Fabrication of Porous Functional Nanonetwork-Structured Polymers with Enhanced Adsorption Performance from Well-Defined Molecular Brush Building Blocks

Abstract

We report the fabrication of porous functional nanonetwork-structured polymers (FNSPs) consisting of poly(acrylic acid) functional cores surrounded by a microporous shell network, via a combination of atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) and Friedel–Crafts hyper-cross-linking chemistry. Well-defined molecular brushes with diblock poly(tert-butyl acrylate)-block-polystyrene (PtBA-b-PS) side chains serve as tunable building blocks to synthesize porous networks. The prepared FNSPs demonstrated significantly enhanced adsorption toward basic dyes, up to 767 mg g–1.