Porous organic polymers for superefficient removal of pollutants from water: Design, synthesis and adsorption performance

Environmental pollution and energy shortage are key problems restricting human and social development. Finding a way to effectively adsorb organic pollutants in wastewater is of great significance for environmental protection. Here, we reasonably design and prepare three novel porous organic polymers with different ratios m-terphenyl (POP-Ts) by Friedel-Crafts alkylation as excellent adsorbents, named POP-T (1:1), POP-T (1:1.5) and POP-T (1:2), respectively. Notably, the proportion of m-terphenyl and biphenyl dichlorobenzyl was optimized for the first time to obtain POPs adsorbents for removal of pollutants from water. Specially, the adsorption experiments showed that POP-T (1:1.5) has excellent adsorption performance of rhodamine B (RhB), methylene blue (MB) and diclofenac (DCF), and the maximum adsorption of POP-T (1:1.5) is 1414.4 mg/g, 1256.6 mg/g and 1028.9 mg/g, respectively. The kinetic data and isothermal data were well fit with the pseudo 2nd order model and Langmuir model, respectively. Moreover, all POP-Ts exhibit excellent stability and the adsorption efficiency is still over 90% after four cycles. Overall, the superefficient adsorption performance is attributed to the hydrophobicity property, large specific surface area (1416 m2/g) and porosity of the POP-T (1:1.5) material.