With the growing population, industrialization, and agriculture, water contamination not only affects people but entire ecosystems. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), because of their large surface area and porosity, show great potential as adsorbents for removing pollutants, such as heavy metals, from contaminated water. The current research aims at examining copper (II) benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxylate (Cu-BTC) MOFs and understanding the mechanism for their adsorption of Pb(II) from aqueous solution. The Cu-BTC samples were characterized using FTIR and XRD, and their surface area and porosity were determined based on N₂ adsorption isotherms. The concentration of Pb(II) in the solutions was measured using atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS). Both kinetic and equilibrium adsorption data were collected and then analyzed using numerical models. The analyses led to the findings that the limiting steps in the adsorption of Pb(II) on Cu-BTC are (a) pore diffusion of Pb(II) and (b) the availability of the active sites on Cu-BTC MOFs. It was further revealed that the former step is more dominant in the adsorption of Pb(II) when the lead concentration is low. The latter step, which is directly proportional to the surface areas of the MOFs, affects the adsorption to a greater extent when the lead concentration is high. The results also show that adsorption of Pb(II) ions on Cu-BTC is mainly a multi-layer heterogeneous process.

The mechanochemical synthesis of metal-organic framework Cu₃(BTC)₂ was conducted with various amounts of water–ethanol liquid added prior to grinding. Using the XRD, SEM and N₂ sorption results, an attempt was made to explain the mechanisms by which liquid may affect the formation of Cu₃(BTC)₂ and its porosity in the grinding process. The experimental results show that microporosity is controlled by the degree of crystallinity of Cu₃(BTC)₂ structures. Within the range of liquid-assisted grinding (LAG), it is found that an increase in the amount of liquid in grinding leads to a larger microporosity in Cu₃(BTC)₂. The formation of mesoporosity and macroporosity is determined by two competing events in LAG: particle breakage and its agglomeration. When the addition of liquid leads to particle breakage over its agglomeration as the dominant event in LAG, it results in smaller Cu₃(BTC)₂ particles, and the network space of these particles constitutes mesoporosity and macroporosity. When the addition of liquid gives rise to particle agglomeration as the dominant event, however, most of this network space collapses so that mesoporosity and macroporosity in the Cu₃(BTC)₂ samples diminish significantly.

In area-selective processes, such as area-selective atomic layer deposition (AS-ALD), there is renewed interest in designing surface modification schemes allowing to tune the reactivity of the nongrowth (NG) substrates. Many efforts are directed toward small molecule inhibitors or atomic layers, which would modify selected surfaces to delay nucleation and provide NG properties in the target AS-ALD processes allowing for the manufacturing of smaller sized features than those produced with alternative approaches. Bromine termination of silicon surfaces, specifically Si(100) and Si(111), is evaluated as a potential pathway to design NG substrates for the deposition of metal oxides, and TiO2 (from cycles of sequential exposures of tetrakis-dimethylamido-titanium and water) is tested as a prototypical deposition material. Nucleation delays on the surfaces produced are comparable to those on H-terminated silicon that is commonly used as an NG substrate. However, the silicon surfaces produced by bromination are more stable, and even oxidation does not change their chemical reactivity substantially. Once the NG surface is eventually overgrown after a large number of ALD cycles, bromine remains at the interface between silicon and TiO2. The NG behavior of different crystal faces of silicon appears to be similar, albeit not identical, despite different arrangements and coverage of bromine atoms.

As the size of the components in electronic devices decreases, new approaches and chemical modification schemes are needed to produce nanometer-size features with bottom-up manufacturing. Organic monolayers can be used as effective resists to block the growth of materials on non-growth substrates in area-selective deposition methods. However, choosing the appropriate surface modification requires knowledge of the corresponding chemistry and also a detailed investigation of the behavior of the functionalized surface in realistic deposition schemes. This study aims to investigate the chemistry of boronic acids that can be used to prepare such non-growth areas on elemental semiconductors. 4-Fluorophenylboronic acid is used as a model to investigate the possibility to utilize the Si(100) surface functionalized with this compound as a non-growth substrate in a titanium dioxide (TiO2) deposition scheme based on sequential doses of tetrakis(dimethylamido)titanium and water. A combination of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry allows for a better understanding of the process. The resulting surface is shown to be an effective non-growth area to TiO2 deposition when compared to currently used H-terminated silicon surfaces but to exhibit much higher stability in ambient conditions.