Ultrafast and selective adsorption of pharmaceuticals from wastewater by precisely designed metal organic framework with missing linker defects

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are widely used and frequently detected in the environment. A series of novel, precisely designed metal-organic framework (MOF) materials with long-range ordered defective structure was proposed by tuning the node connectivity and missing linkers/clusters. The adsorption abilities of anti-inflammatory drugs were significantly improved (79.87 mg/g, 561.37 mg/g·min for ibuprofen (IBU)) over the defective UiO-66 (node connectivity = 7.8), which were 2.5 and 59.8 times higher than that over the defect-free one (32.16 mg/g, 9.39 mg/g • min). The adsorption rate constant of IBU was accelerated 1.12 × 10⁴ times greater than that of the activated carbon. For the first time, the performance was evaluated under the environmentally relevant concentration (200 μg/L to 0.025 μg/L) with removal percentages ∼ 90% within 1 min. Theoretical calculations were conducted to study the mechanism. Furthermore, 15 micropollutants with various functional groups (sulfonamides, quinolones, macrolides, etc.) with high environmental risks proved our concept that electrostatic interaction could be the primary mechanism. Real wastewater in Beijing was sampled and evaluated the performance of removing the pharmaceuticals (concentration: 199.21 ± 3.65 ng/L ∼ 0.10 ± 0.01 ng/L), a complete removal can be achieved in only 3 min with concentrations below instrumental detection limits. This finding provides a promising strategy for designing materials for rapidly removing pharmaceuticals in water.