Morphological Transformation Reactions of Photocatalytic Metalloporphyrin-Containing Coordination Polymer Particles from Seed Structures

Coordination polymer particles have attracted a great deal of attention due to their characteristic properties and diverse applications in the fields of gas storage, catalysis, optics, sensing, electronics, photochemistry, and biology. Herein, we investigated shape transformation reactions of zinc 5, 10, 15, 20-tetra(4-pyridyl)-21 H, 23 H-porphine (ZnTPyP)-containing coordination polymer particles (ZnTPyP-CPPs) from seed structures by delicately controlling the Gibbs energy of the self-assembly system. We obtained a morphological transformation from 1 D short nanorods to 1 D long nanorods and 3 D nano-octahedral structures, and from 3 D nano-octahedral structures to 1 D nanorod structures. We illustrated a new method to design and synthesize metalloporphyrin-containing CPPs in a controllable manner. Furthermore, photocatalytic properties of ZnTPyP-CPPs were tested, showing good catalytic abilities towards the photodegradation of methylene blue (MB) under visible light illumination.