Various porous adsorbent materials have shown excellent adsorption performance for the removal of organic micro-pollutants in water. However, the practical application was hindered by the high cost or slow adsorption kinetics for most of porous adsorbents. Therefore, it is of great significance to develop economic adsorbent materials with characteristic like low-cost, easier preparation method, excellent adsorption kinetics etc.Herein, based on the Friedel-Crafts alkylation reaction, we reported three novel hydrophilic organic porous adsorbent frameworks (PAF-210, PAF-211 and PAF-212) with high Brunauer-Emmet-Teller (BET) surface area (956 ∼ 1384 m2/g) for phenolic micro-pollutants (bisphenol A (BPA), 2,4-dichlorophenol (2,4-DCP) and 2-naphthol (2-NO)) adsorption in water, which were prepared by using cheap trimethyl orthoformate (TMOF) as crosslinker and one-step simple ball milling synthetic method under room temperature within 15 min. Rich oxygen content promotes the resulting polymers to possess excellent hydrophilicity and wettability through water vapor adsorption and water contact angle analysis. The excellent hydrophilicity and proper porous properties made the resulting frameworks suitable as porous organic adsorbents to rapidly remove organic phenolic micro-pollutants from water. Among the resulting polymers, the PAF-210 exhibited ultra-fast adsorption (>94.0 % within 5 s), ultra-rapid adsorption kinetics with pseudo-second-order rate constants (K2, up to 7.72g/mg min−1 for 2,4-DCP), high pollutant adsorption capacity (up to 867.03 mg g−1 for BPA) and excellent recyclability (10 cycles with slight loss in adsorption capacity) through systematically characterization. The adsorption performances of PAF-210 are much better than these of the commercial activated carbons and β-cyclodextrin-based porous adsorbents (K2 = 1.50g/mg min−1 for P-CDP) etc. The favorable hydrophilicity, surface wettability, and adsorption performance of PAF-210 were significantly better than the comparative material constructed by using benzene and formaldehyde dimethyl acetal (FDA) through conventional thermal synthetic method, which is a very classic synthesis strategy in the field of porous materials. More importantly, the PAF-210 exhibited relatively superior adsorption performance on BPA, and it still presented excellent adsorption performance (removal efficiency ≥ 96.8 % within 5 s after 10 cycles) even at the safe range of BPA quantified in drinking water (BPA≤10 μg L−1, Standards for drinking water quality, GB5749-2022, China). XPS analysis and theoretical simulations proved that the excellent adsorption performance and ultra-fast adsorption rate stem from interactions including π-π interactions, hydrogen bonding and van der Waals interactions between PAF-210 and micro-pollutants.
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