| Sumario: | Innovative bimetallic MOFs offer more possibilities to further tailor the properties of MOFs, which have attracted great attention for wide applications. However, it is still a great challenge to rationally design bimetallic MOFs due to the lack of a tunable and reasonable hybrid structure architecture. Herein, a new series of bimetallic metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) with tunable pillar linkers were prepared by a one-step synthesis method. These bimetallic MOFs retain the same crystal structure when the mole fraction (based on metal) of the two metals changes from 0 to 1 and both metal ions occupy random nodal positions. The incorporation of a second metal cation has a large influence on the intrinsic properties (e.g. thermal stabilities and band gaps) of the MOFs. Furthermore, these bimetallic MOFs were used as self-sacrificial templates to prepare bimetal oxide catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). After pyrolysis, a porous and hierarchical honeycomb-like structure with carbon network covered (bi)metal oxides is formed. Among all the bimetallic MOF-derived catalysts, CoNi1@C showed the best performance for the OER with the lowest Tafel slopes (55.6 mV dec−1) and overpotentials (335 mV on a glassy carbon electrode and 276 mV on Ni foam) at a current density of 10 mA cm−2, which is higher than those of state-of-the-art Co–Ni mixed oxide catalysts derived from MOFs for the OER. Our results indicate that the incorporation of a second metal ion is a promising strategy to tailor the properties of MOFs. More importantly, this new bimetallic MOF family with tunable linkers is expected to serve as a flexible assembly platform to offer broad possibilities for practical applications of MOFs.
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