Natural Ellagic Acid-Derived Nanoporous Organic Polymers for CO2 and Organic Dye Adsorption

The utilization of natural renewable molecules to fabricate functional materials is of great significance. In this work, two bioinspired porous organic polymers (POPs), namely, EA-TAPB and EA-TAPT, were easily prepared from ellagic acid (EA) and C3-symmetric amines via an aqueous diazo-coupling strategy. Both azo-linked POPs exhibit good stability and possess a hierarchical nanoporous structure with abundant neighboring phenol groups. Benefiting from these, the as-prepared POPs showed excellent performances in the selective capture of CO2 and in the charge-selective adsorption of dyes. Particularly, the superhydrophilicity of EA groups in these azo-linked POPs renders them with ultrafast removal ability of cationic dyes from water. The pseudo-second-order constants of EA-TAPB are 47.314 and 12.300 g mg–1 min–1 for MB and RhB, respectively, which are superior to those reported adsorption materials. This work represents an effective approach to constructing low-cost functional POPs for task-specific applications.