One-pot synthesis of a highly porous anionic hypercrosslinked polymer for ultrafast adsorption of organic pollutants

Abstract

One of the challenges in water remediation is adsorbent designing, aiming at low cost and ultrafast contaminant adsorption. Herein, we developed a simple and scalable one-pot synthesis method to achieve a cost-effective anionic hypercrosslinked polymer (AHCP-1) through the Friedel–Crafts reaction with sodium tetraphenylboron as the monomer. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first anionic hypercrosslinked polymer synthesized using the Friedel–Crafts reaction. Notably, AHCP-1 possessed a high specific surface area of 939 m² g⁻¹ with a micro-/mesoporous structure. Owing to the high surface area, the abundant phenyl groups and the built-in ionic charges, AHCP-1 displayed ultrafast adsorption towards dyes and phenolic derivatives, and a high adsorption capacity of 229.89 mg g⁻¹ for RhB and 540.5 mg g⁻¹ for BPA. It is also found that the adsorption behavior is dependent on the pollutant concentration, the pH value, and the structure and charge states of the pollutant molecules.