Hypercrosslinked Polymers: A Review

Hypercrosslinked polymers (HCPs) represent a class of nanoporous materials with a wide range of practical and potential applications such as gas sorption and separation, heterogeneous catalysis, drug delivery, and chromatographic separation. First introduced by Davankov and Tsyurupa in the early 1970s, HCPs have developed rapidly over the past few decades. Mostly based on Friedel-Crafts chemistry, HCP materials can be prepared from the post-crosslinking of polystyrene-type precursors in their swollen state, or from the condensation of small building blocks. HCP materials manifest numerous important advantages, including moderate synthetic conditions, an enormous stockroom of inexpensive monomers, robust structures, and good thermal and chemical stabilities. This review article aims to provide an overview of recent publications on HCPs, and the emphasis is positioned on the synthetic approaches, theoretical studies, characterizations, structure-property relationships, and applications of these HCP materials.