Recent Advance in Organic Porous Polycarbazoles: Preparation and Properties

Abstract

Polycarbazole has rigid backbone and conjugated electron rich system, which are beneficial to form permanent porous materials, enhance interactions between adsorbate and adsorbent, and exhibit intrinsic optical and electrical perfor- mance. As a novel kind of porous materials, organic porous polycarbazoles possess high specific surface area and permanent porosity, which have drawn great interests owing to the advantages in synthetic diversity, pore size controllability, optical and electrical properties. The preparation of organic porous polycarbazoles has recently been developed rapidly because of their great potential applications in gas storage, separation, vapor adsorption, catalysis, sensing and organic electronics. As for preparative methods of the organic porous polycarbazoles, carbazole-based oxidative coupling polymerization and Friedel-Crafts alkylation are the representative methods. Some other synthetic methods such as nitrile-based trimerization of aromatic nitriles and classic carbon-carbon coupling polymerization. Recently, a facile method for the preparation of hyper- crosslinked organic porous polycarbazoles via FeCl3-promoted one-step oxidative coupling reaction and Friedel-Crafts alkyl- ation in one pot has also been reported. According to the summarized results of porosity and adsorption performance, mi- cro/mesoporous conjugated polycarbazole with high porosity can be obtained via molecular structure tuning. The Brunau- er-Emmett-Teller specific surface area of porous polycarbazole is up to 2440 m 2 •g −1 . The adsorption performance of some organic porous polycarbazoles not only can be comparable with that of the known porous organic polymers with ultrahigh specific surface area, such as PAF-1 and PNN-4, but also can be competitive with the best reported results for porous organic polymers, activated carbons, and metal−organic frameworks under the same conditions. Herein, recent advance such as syn- thetic methods, properties, and applications in organic porous polycarbazoles has been reviewed. Keywords carbazole; porous organic polymer; preparation; property and application