• carbon dioxide capture
• cross coupling reactions
• direct arylations
• fluorinated ligands
• Metal Organic Frameworks

The global warming, due to the CO2 emission, is one of the most important issues that the world is facing nowadays. To remedy to this situation, worldwide efforts have been devoted to the development of new technologies or processes for effective carbon dioxide capture. In congruence with this, metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are considered as new promising porous materials for CO2 adsorption and separation. One of the most important features of the MOFs is the capability of designing the pore size and surface properties by the selection of organic ligands. Specifically, highly polar fluorine atom(s) on the organic linkers can enhance the carbon dioxide gas-uptake and selectivity of the MOF, introducing hydrophobicity in the framework. In view of this, during this thesis work, fluorinated terephthalic acids and imidazole-based compounds were synthesized, in order to preliminary evaluate their potential applicability, as organic linkers, in the metal organic frameworks’ field. In particular, the target of this research was the preparation of those compounds through simple protocols and commercial available precursors. The carboxylic acid derivatives were prepared following two different approaches: i) oxidation with permanganate in basic medium and ii) ortho-lithiation procedure. Considering the imidazole-based system, innovative C-N and C-C bond forming reactions promoted by transition metals were included, to synthetize N-arylated and C-5-arylated imidazole units, respectively.
With these ligands in our hands, preliminary studies on synthesis and characterization of Cu (II) and Ce (IV) MOF were carried out, obtaining some novel crystalline materials in good yields.