Porous organic polymers (POPs) in environmental remediation

Abstract

Environmental pollution is increasing alarmingly due to the rapid growth in human civilization and rapid industrialization. Water pollution is one of the types of pollution that need significant attention. Detection of industrial waste and its removal from different wastewater sources is a current challenge. Ionic porous organic polymers (iPOPs) have established themselves as one of the efficient solid-state adsorbents in the remediation of industrial wastewater, but a significant strategy still needs to be developed for designing high-performance iPOP-based solid-state adsorbents. In this report, three cationic porous organic polymers (iPOP-IMZ-1, iPOP-IMZ-2, and iPOP-IMZ-3), considering a guanidium-based cationic building block, have been designed and synthesized. The positive charge density in the polymers was manipulated by changing the secondary building blocks to tune the adsorption ability. The result shows that iPOP-IMZ-2, owing to its higher charge density around the active binding site, has superior adsorption activity compared to the other two polymers. Additionally, due to the fluorescent nature of iPOP-IMZ-2 and iPOP-ZN-3, they were used as fluorescent sensors for the detection of Cr2O72- and MnO4- ions. Both ions show efficient detection ability at the ppm level.