Scale synthesis of spherical porous porphyrinic organic polymers for efficient iodine capture and CO2 adsorption

Abstract Introducing electron-rich groups into the covalent organic polymers (COPs) with porous structure can endow the resulting materials with great potentials in waste gas uptake and nuclear pollutant adsorption. In this work, five porphyrin-based COPs with pyrrole and various aldehyde (bithiophenyl-5,5′-dicarbaldehyde, terephthalaldehyde, 2,6-pyridinedicarboxaldehyde, 1,3,5-benzenetricarboxaldehyde and furan-2,5-dicarbaldehyde) as precursors were constructed by a simple and fast one-pot synthesis procedure within 2 h. The production scale of them all reached over 5 g. These spherical COPs all showed the capability of rapid and efficient capture of iodine in cyclohexane and CO2 in gas. Iodine in cyclohexane solution of 200 cm3 g−1 can be almost adsorbed 100% within 3 h. The admirable COPs synthesized by terephthalaldehyde and pyrrole exhibit extremely high capture capacity of over 760 mg g−1 for iodine in solution. Besides, the CO2 uptake on five COPs was also impressive, even with a capacity of 79 mg g−1. The scale synthesis of novel porphyrinic COPs enabled them to become practically available adsorbents especially for iodine capture.