Covalent organic frameworks (COFs): perspectives of industrialization

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) represent a type of promising porous crystalline material because of their enormous application potential in many fields, such as adsorption, catalysis, organic electronics, chemo-sensing and energy storage. Recent research achievements in the field of COFs, especially the results related to their application for industrialization, have led to great progress since the ground-breaking work of Yaghi and co-workers in 2005. However, although there are many reviews about COFs, no one has concentrated on the industrialization of COFs. Therefore in this critical review, we summarize the state-of-the-art development of COFs from an industrial point of view in five aspects, including their types, growth mechanisms, synthetic methods, processability and applications. Also we really hope that this review will arouse more scholars' attention to the industrialization of COFs.