Glucose/fructose-based boric acid-bridged in-situ generated macrocyclic polymers and their behaviors in capturing dyes

Abstract

To better study the mechanism of hierarchical porous polymers towards targeted substrates at molecular level, we fabricated glucose/fructose-based crosslinked porous polymers with boric acid as the covalent bridge to in-situ generate flexible macrocyclic skeletons including BA-G and BA-F. Thus obtained BA-G/BA-F polymers were fully characterized by SEM, FT-IR, XRD, TGA, DTG, BET, zeta potential and XPS, indicating the formation of porous structures with good specific surface area. We also demonstrate the successful application of those polymers to efficient adsorption of diverse cationic dyes.The adsorption properties of BA-G/BA-F polymeric materials were studied by analyzing the adsorption effect towards single dyes, the adsorption of kinetic studies, as well as adsorption isotherm. Interestingly, as indicated by those studies, chemical adsorption played a dominant role in molecular recognition of BA-G/BA-F towards cationic dyes. And thermal kinetic studies also show related trends in parameters, indicating in-situ generated porous structures spontaneously absorbing dyes driven by electrostatic and hydrogen bonding interactions. Furthermore, the mimicking behavior of macrocyclic skeletons by in-situ fabrication was then proved by the analysis of elemental composition via EDS, molecular weight of material pieces via MALDI test, as well as proposed 2 in-situ generated macrocyclic structures towards targeted substrates via DFT calculations.