Construction and gas uptake performance of cyano-functional hypercrosslinked polymers via knitting strategy

Fabrication of functionalized hypercrosslinked polymers (HCPs) with high specific surface area has gained significant research interest and their utilization for gas storage is still a trending research area. Considering the significance of solvent knitting strategy in construction of remarkably high surface area HCPs, we report fabrication of cyano-functional HCPs via one step Friedel-Crafts reaction. The series of HCPs were obtained by copolymerizing the rigid monomer TPB with a 2-napthonitrile in different molar ratio. The resultant co-polymerized polymers contained a plenty of nitrile functional groups and possessed high BET surface area. Among the series of such HCPs, HCP-TPB-CN-3:1 showed the highest BET surface area up to 2017 m2g−1. These HCPs have enriched nitrogen in their pore walls that enhance the facile interaction of CO2 to achieve higher capture capacity of 21.3 wt% at 273 K. Moreover, the HCP-TPB-CN was explored for CH4 storage and showed absolute adsorption capacity of 0.35 g/g at 273 K, 80 bar, which is comparable with the porous polymers reported so far. These results highlight the significance of solvent knitting strategy and broaden the scope of HCPs for versatile industrial applications.