Abstract:
Fuel counts in basic necessity of modern life. However, fuel consumption has been
turned into severe danger to the environment as well as human life due to the presence
of sulfur components in fuel. Therefore, it has become essentially important to achieve
ultra-low sulfur fuel. For this purpose, desulfurization has been vastly undergoing by
using various techniques in recent decades. Polyoxometalates (POMs) are polyatomic
anions comprising transition metal oxyanions associated with bridged oxygen atoms
resulting in closed three-dimensional assemblies. POMs and their hybrid materials
(such as POM-based porphyrin and POM based metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)),
have been mostly reported in multidisciplinary research fields as brilliant candidates
due to their characteristics properties. Specifically, hybrids of POM and porphyrin (~
POM@Porphyrin = POMOF) are outstanding materials for intended applications which
being inorganic filler further incorporate in mixed matrix membranes (MMMs).
MMMs generally fabricated through incorporation of inorganic fillers in polymeric
matrix, have achieved great attention in recent research progress due to multiple
applications in gas storage, catalysis, sensing, wastewater treatment, and biomedicine.
The main objective of the current study is to use POMOF as a catalyst in
desulfurization. Therefore, three POMOFs were fabricated by varying ratios (1:1, 2:1,
3:1) of cationic and anionic species. Characterization analyses such as UV/Vis, FTIR,
and TGA showed successful synthesis of these POMOFs. The efficiency of POMOFs
followed an order as 3 (95.5%)> 2 (85.5%)> 1 (70.3%). Among these three POMOFs,
3 exhibited excellent catalytic property in desulfurization. Furthermore, the
desulfurization process could be recycled for ten times without a significant decrease
in catalytic efficiency. Interestingly, POMOFs successfully accomplished
desulfurization of model diesel oil and showed excellent renewability. To the best of
our knowledge, such kind of POMOFs with special surroundings and bi-functional
active sites are not reported
