Recent Progress of Advanced Conductive Metal-Organic Frameworks: Precise Synthesis, Electrochemical Energy Storage Applications, and Future Challenges

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with diverse composition, tunable structure, and unique physicochemical properties have emerged as promising materials in various fields. The tunable pore structure, abundant active sites, and ultrahigh specific surface area can facilitate mass transport and provide outstanding capacity, making MOFs an ideal active material for electrochemical energy storage and conversion. However, the poor electrical conductivity of pristine MOFs severely limits their applications in electrochemistry. Developing conductive MOFs has proved to be an effective solution to this problem. This review focuses on the design and synthesis of conductive MOF composites with judiciously chosen conducting materials, pristine MOFs, and assembly methods, as well as the preparation of intrinsically conductive MOFs based on building 2D pi-conjugated structures, introducing mixed-valence metal ions/redox-active ligands, designing pi-pi stacked pathways, and constructing infinite metal-sulfur chains (-M-S-)(infinity). Furthermore, recent progress and challenges of conductive MOFs for energy storage and conversion (supercapacitors, Li-ion batteries, Li-S batteries, and electrochemical water splitting) are summarized.