Résumé
Over recent years, the family of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) or porous coordination polymers and related materials has seen a very rapid development both in terms of synthesis of novel porous adsorbents and their potential use in a wide variety of applications. The possibility to use almost any metal as nodes and a large diversity of organic species as linker units leads to a huge variety of materials with different pore architectures and surface chemistries. It is also possible to functionalise these materials and introduce extra-framework species which further enlarges the possibilities to tailor these solids for a targeted application. Many studies with MOFs have focused on gas adsorption properties. The aim of this chapter is to give a short exploration of the effect of changing a given feature of the MOFs (ligand length, functionalisation, metal node, flexibility, etc.) on their adsorption properties. We have insisted, where possible, on the use of complementary methods (calorimetry, X-ray diffraction, infra-red, molecular modelling) to get an in-depth characterization of the adsorption behaviour of such solids. With the variety of MOF architectures, it is not always simple to estimate a surface area of these materials, and to address this, a discussion of about the assessment and meaning of the BET area is given.