Naphthyl Substitution-Induced Fine Tuning of Porosity and Gas Uptake Capacity in Microporous Hyper-Cross-Linked Amine Polymers

Exploring the effect of functional group substitution on the porous structure and gas adsorption performance of polymer materials is becoming much fascinating. Here, three novel polymers, based on various amine building blocks, were efficiently prepared by the solvent knitting method. It is intriguingly found that with the gradual functional group substitution of phenyl by naphthyl in building blocks both porosity and gas uptake capacity of these hyper-cross-linked polymers can be finely tuned, with SBET increased from 874 to 1717 m2 g–1, and CO2 adsorption capacity tuned from 12.76 to 18.85 wt % (273.15 K/1.00 bar). Besides, these polymers could reveal CO2/N2 selectivity up to 24.9 and CO2/CH4 selectivity of 6.3 at 298.15 K. This work has proved that increasing the number of naphthyl in precursors will be in favor of knitting microporous with improved porosity and enhanced gas uptake ability, and naphthyl outweighs phenyl in their contributions to bettering the porosity parameters and gas uptake capacity of synthesized polymers, which is crucially important for the further research.