Covalent Organic Frameworks-Based Nanomaterials for Hydrogen Evolution Reactions

Abstract

The advent of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) occurred around 2005 and despite its infant stage, this technology has demonstrated a great potential to likely be one of the major classes of materials used to generate energy in the future. Despite their organic nature, COFs are highly symmetric and therefore crystalline materials that can be vastly tuned to acquire applicable properties. In that regard, this chapter describes the versatile structures of COFs that can be employed for the water-splitting process to generate H2 through both electro and photocatalysis. This chapter provides a brief introduction describing the main concepts of COFs along with their main advantages and disadvantages compared to other nanomaterials. The second session describes the types of COFs along with a description of some approaches to modify their properties through morphology, tunability, effect of different linkers, geometries, among other aspects. The third and fourth sessions provide literature-based examples for the use of COFs in electro and photocatalytic processes for the generation of H2 through HER, respectively. Through that, the applicable concepts of COFs are explicated with examples that can be further incorporated into the line of research related to energy generation.