According to KAUST, the material and the method to create it could help in the development of further advanced materials with applications in photocatalysis and optoelectronics.
Voids give porous materials a large surface area, which is favourable for adsorbing other chemicals and acting as an enhanced catalyst for chemical reactions.
Porous organic polymers (POPs) have shown promise for these applications because of their high porosity and their chemical and thermal stability, plus the flexibility to tailor chemical response to capture specific target molecules and enhance selected reactions.
Cafer Yavuz and colleagues from KAUST, collaborating with co-workers from Korea and the US, have demonstrated a simple “one-pot” catalyst-free process for creating a highly porous POP called poly(aryl thioether).
“We’ve shown that polyarylthioethers can be produced simply from sodium sulphide and perfluorinated aromatics,” Yavuz said in a statement. “We believe that we have uncovered a powerful strategy that went against common understanding and could be used to build sulphur-based materials in a tuneable fashion.”
Poly(aryl thioether)s are made up of perfluorinated aromatic compounds bound together by sulphur linkers. One of the challenges in reproducibly creating the material is that the sodium sulphide can react with the perfluorinated aromatic compounds at a few different atomic sites, so a single reaction can create a combination of differing structures.
Yavuz and the team created their poly(aryl thioether) using polycondensation. They show that through careful temperature control, they can ensure the formation of bonds at a particular atom over other possible atoms, which prevented random crosslinking and enabled an elevated level of control over the material’s porosity.
They also demonstrated that the resultant porous organic polymer had a pore size of less than a nanometre and exhibited a high surface area of up to 753 square meters per gram of material. The team was able to demonstrate the utility of the substance by using it to remove organic micropollutants and mercury ions from water.
“We would like to now prepare large-scale batches and provide these new porous materials for electronic or photocatalytic applications,” said Yavuz. “For this, we will be working with the electronics industry and water treatment facilities.”
The team’s findings have been published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
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