Novel phenol-functionalized hypercrosslinked polymer for efficient tetracycline and iodine adsorption

The environmental remediation is a growing focus in recent years. Hypercrosslinked polymers (HCPs) are highly valuable as prominent adsorbents for pollutants due to its structural designability, low production costs and high intrinsic porosities. In this study, a novel phenol-based hypercrosslinked polymer namely HCPs-TBP with abundant O sites was constructed via a one-step hyper-crosslinking reaction. The structure and thermal stability of HCPs-TBP was confirmed by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectra, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), elemental mappings, powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) patterns, N2 adsorption-desorption, 13C nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (13C MAS NMR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Combining with the electron-donor -OH functional groups, electron-rich conjugated-it benzene rings structure and the abundant pore structure, the phenol-functionalized porous polymers showed good adsorption capacity for the tetracycline and iodine, and the adsorption capacity of I2 solution achieved 237.6 mg g-1, accompanied by repeating 5 times adsorption of tetracycline and iodine without any structure collapse. Additionally, the quasi-first-order and quasi-secondary kinetic model, as well as Langmuir, Freundlich and Tempkin models, successfully described the adsorption kinetics and isothermal adsorption of iodine solution by HCPs-TBP. The study unlocks new possibilities for further application of HCPs in adsorption of environmental pollutants from water.