One-pot synthesis of viologen-based hypercrosslinked polymers for efficient volatile iodine capture

The effective and reversible storage radioactive iodine is an important environmental issue during nuclear fission. In the present work, we reported a facile one-pot method to construct viologen-based hypercrosslinked polymers. To enhance the capture efficiency of iodine, viologens were incorporated to endow hypercrosslinked polymers with nitrogen heteroatoms and charged sites simultaneously. High surface areas, abundant microporosity, and electron-rich aromatic networks of the developed material also contributed to the uptake capacity. A high uptake ability for iodine up to 525 wt% was achieved, which was comparable to the highest value in the reported porous organic polymers. Our findings provided great development prospect for the application of hypercrosslinked polymers in the environmental remediation.