Hydrophobic coordination polymer nanoparticles and application for oil – water separation †

Having control over the chemistry of colloid surfaces has attracted the interest of scientists for many years as they play a critical role in many chemical and life science processes; by chemically modifying the surface or by adding other components one can enhance their stability and performance. Over the past decades, different experimental approaches have been developed with this aim and a vast amount of basic knowledge has been accumulated in nanoparticles, becoming a battleship for many chemists. One of the latest families to be incorporated is that of amorphous coordination polymer particles (CPPs). Despite being rst described less than a decade ago, CPPs (combining metal ions and organic ligands) have allowed for new amazing functions/properties and applications. Rapid innovations in all these elds have increased the likelihood that CPPs will eventually come into several other materials and media. Therefore, the development of new approaches to enhance their processability represents a challenge, among them, the fabrication of hydrophobic CPPs. The most direct approach to achieve this goal is a priori the hierarchical assembly of nanoparticles using ligands with long alkyl chains, a small fraction of which is expected to remain on the nanoparticle surface. With this aim, we fabricated hydrophobic nanoparticles with the general composition [Co(bix)(hdcat)2], where bix is the ligand 1,4-bis(imidazol-1-ylmethyl)