Superhydrophobic conjugated microporous polymers show good selectivity, fast adsorption kinetics, excellent recyclability and absorbencies for a wide range of organic solvents and oils, which make them the promising candidates for potential applications, including liquid-liquid separation, water treatment and so on.Superhydrophobic surfaces (water contact angle (CA) larger than 150 ) have generated extensive commercial and academic interest. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] In recent years, there has been an increased interest in generation and utilization of the surface superhydrophobicity of a solid for direct separation or selective adsorption of oil or hydrophobic organic solvents from water. The first example for oil-water separation by using superhydrophobic and superoleophilic coating mesh has been reported by Jiang et al. 8 Along this line, more recently, the creation of nanometre-or micrometre-sized porous materials with excellent surface superhydrophobicity has been reported and successfully used for separation and adsorption of oils or organic solvents from water. For example, Yuan et al. reported the selective adsorption of oil from water by a superwetting nanowire membrane. 9 Similar selective adsorption performance has also been reported by Zhang et al. using superhydrophobic nanoporous polydivinylbenzene. 10 Due to their excellent selective adsorption performance, fast adsorption kinetics, good working capacity and recyclable use performance, these materials have great advantages over those traditional absorbent materials such as active carbons, 11,12 which suffer from a number of drawbacks, including slow adsorption kinetics, poor selectivity and limited working capacity. Owing to the global scale of severe water pollution arising from oil spills and industrial organic pollutants, the creation of efficient absorbent materials for separation and removal of oils or organic pollutants from water should be of great importance to address environmental issues. Broader contextOwing to the global scale of severe water pollution arising from oil spills and industrial organic pollutants, the creation of efficient absorbent materials for separation and removal of oils or organic pollutants from water should be of great importance to address environmental issues. Here we report for the first time the surface superhydrophobicity of the conjugated microporous polymers (CMP) as well as their excellent adsorption performance for oils and organic solvents. Due to their open pore structures and excellent surface superhydrophobicity, oils or non-polar organic solvents can be easily absorbed and separated from water by the CMP without adsorption of water. The CMP also show excellent adsorption performance for those polar organic solvents and toxic organic solvents with the absorbencies ranging approximately from 700 wt% to 1500 wt% for the HCMP-1 and 600 wt% to 2300 wt% for the HCMP-2, respectively. By loading the CMP, the hydrophilic sponge can be changed to be oleophilic to oil. With a loading of 7.0 mg cm À3 of the HCMP-1 ...

hydrogen, [2] solar power plants, [3] photovoltaic cells, [4] photocatalysis, [5] and water desalination, [6] the photothermal materials based solar water evaporation is one of the most promising approaches for harvesting and conversion of solar energy. Solar vapor generation, more specifically, is a surface water evaporation process in which the light is absorbed and converted to heat energy by photothermal materials to generate vapor. Compared with the common water evaporation by solar radiation as heat source which suffers from the drawback of low solar energy conversion efficiency due to the fact that the part solar energy is converted to heat bulk water or is lost to the external environment, solar vapor generation based on photothermal materials has great advantages for its high light-to-heat conversion efficiency due to the fact that solar radiation is only harvested and located at the water-air interface to heat thin air-water surface layer that can effectively minimize the heat loss. [7] Based on the merits mentioned above, up to now, the solar steam generator has been emerged as a kind of efficient device for harvesting solar energy and attracted extensively much more attention in both industrial and academic research throughout the past decades. [8,9] In a given solar steam generation system, the photothermal materials is essential. A desired photothermal material should meet the following criteria: the broadband sunlight absorbability, low thermal conductivity, open porosity for rapid water molecules transportation, and high-energy conversion efficiency. [10,11] Understanding of these complementary roles of these parameters for photothermal material, so far, a number of photothermal materials, including carbon-based materials, [7,8,[12][13][14] metallic nanoparticles, [15][16][17] biomass-based materials, [18,19] and porous polymers, [20,21] etc., have been developed to use as efficient solar steam generators.In general, porous materials with bilayer structure are widely adapted as solar steam generator, in which the top layer consists of carbon materials for light absorption (e.g., graphene, [13] CNTs, [14] graphite, [7] etc.) while the bottom layer is composed by the porous materials (e.g., wood, [18] silica, [10] etc.) for Solar steam generation has been proven to be one of the most efficient approaches for harvesting solar energy for diverse applications such as distillation, desalination, and production of freshwater. Here, the synthesis of monolithic carbon aerogels by facile carbonization of conjugated microporous polymer nanotubes as efficient solar steam generators is reported. The monolithic carbon-aerogel networks consist of randomly aggregated hollow-carbon-nanotubes (HCNTs) with 100-250 nm in diameter and a length of up to several micrometers to form a hierarchically nanoporous network structure. Treatment of the HCNTs aerogels with an ammonium peroxydisulfate/sulfuric acid solution endows their superhydrophilic wettability which is beneficial for rapid transportation of water molecules. ...

Conjugated microporous polymers having thiophene building blocks (SCMPs), which originated from ethynylbenzene monomers with 2,3,5-tribromothiophene, were designedly synthesized through Pd(0)/CuI catalyzed Sonogashira-Hagihara cross-coupling polymerization. The morphologies, structure and physicochemical properties of the as-synthesized products were characterized through scanning electron microscope (SEM), thermogravimeter analysis (TGA), (13)C CP/MAS solid state NMR and Fourier transform infrared spectroscope (FTIR) spectra. Nitrogen sorption-desorption analysis shows that the as-synthesized SCMPs possesses a high specific surface area of 855 m(2) g(-1). Because of their abundant porosity, π-conjugated network structure, as well as electron-rich thiophene building units, the SCMPs show better adsorption ability for iodine and a high uptake value of 222 wt % was obtained, which can compete with those nanoporous materials such as silver-containing zeolite, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and conjugated microporous polymers (CMPs), etc. Our study might provide a new possibility for the design and synthesis of functional CMPs containing electron-rich building units for effective capture and reversible storage of volatile iodine to address environmental issues.

Conjugated microporous polymer nanotubes (CMPNs) were synthesized and employed as a platform for investigation of CO2 and I2 adsorption. A high adsorption capacity of up to 208 wt% for reversible I2 capture was achieved.

Highly porous activated carbon with a large surface area and pore volume was synthesized by KOH activation using commercially available activated carbon as a precursor. By modification with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), highly porous activated carbon showed superhydrophobicity with a water contact angle of 163.6°. The changes in wettability of PDMS‐ treated highly porous activated carbon were attributed to the deposition of a low‐surface‐energy silicon coating onto activated carbon (confirmed by X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy), which had microporous characteristics (confirmed by XRD, SEM, and TEM analyses). Using an easy dip‐coating method, superhydrophobic activated carbon‐coated sponges were also fabricated; those exhibited excellent absorption selectivity for the removal of a wide range of organics and oils from water, and also recyclability, thus showing great potential as efficient absorbents for the large‐scale removal of organic contaminants or oil spills from water.