Are porous metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) breakthrough materials, or are they simply an illusion reminiscent of ‘‘The Emperor’s New Clothes?’’
Over the past three decades, the domain of porous solids has been expanded by the discovery of various ‘‘cornerstone’’ materials, such as ALPO molecular sieves (1982), carbon nanotubes (1991), ordered silica mesoporous materials (1992), and CMK (1999), to name just a few. Porous MOFs were first described in Volume 4 of the Handbook of Porous Solids, published by Wiley-VCH in 2002. Since that time, this class of materials has become much better known and much more widely studied. The number of publications dealing with MOFs and porous coordination polymers is currently increasing at an exponential rate – with the total doubling every 2 years. In 2009, we could count about 1200 new publications, a rate similar to that observed for ordered mesoporous materials.