Construction of hypercrosslinked polymers with styrene-based copolymer precursor for adsorption of rare earth elements

Adsorption and separation of rare earth elements (REEs) are of significant importance due to their unique properties and low supply of these elements. Porous hypercrosslinked polymers (HCPs) are currently an important category of polymer adsorbents and attracting great interest because of their merits including high surface area, moderate synthetic conditions and various building blocks. Herein, for the first time, we constructed HCPs with copolymers precursors and applied to the adsorption of REEs. Styrene (S) and glycidyl methacrylate-iminodiacetic acid (GMA-IDA) were polymerized by a facile reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer process, and GMA-IDA-co-PS copolymers were employed as precursors to construct HCPs. The adsorption behavior of REEs was investigated in detail with Tb3+ as a representative. The separation of light, medium and heavy REEs was also studied. It is the first attempt that copolymers were employed to the preparation of HCPs and used in the area of REEs adsorption, which can serve as a foundation for further design and application of various HCPs in the field of adsorption.