Water contamination is currently one of the world’s major issues which has caused severe problems for human health and Earth’s ecosystems. Among various strategies proposed for water purification, adsorption has received the most attention; however, the ability to design a sorbent with high uptake capacity and selectivity for a single pollutant continues to elude researchers [1,2]. In the present work, we have chosen UiO-66 as a water-stable MOF in order to study the removal of pollutant dyes. The 12-coordinated zirconium-oxo clusters in this MOF in connection with1,4-benzenedicarboxylate linkers form a structure which possesses micropores of approximately 6 Å in diameter [3,4]. However, microporous system of UiO- 66 hinders fast molecular diffusion and mass transfer of dye molecules. Thus, we utilized benzoic acid as modulating agent to expand the pore widths of UiO-66 to the mesoporous regime by creating defect sites. Primary results indicate that modulated-UiO-66 shows enhancement in the adsorption capacity in comparison with UiO-66.

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