Sulfur-containing polymers are a group of fascinating materials and have attracted much attention recently, owing to their unique metal coordination ability, high refractive index, and rich redox chemistry, which have been applied in noble metal recovery, self-healing, optoelectronic devices, etc. However, the dominant factor restricting their development is the lack of efficient and economic synthetic methods. Multicomponent polymerizations (MCPs) have proved to be a powerful tool for rapidly converting simple monomers to complex polymer materials because of their great designability, structural diversity, simple procedure, and environmental benefit. Herein, we reported a series of multicomponent polymerizations of elemental sulfur, diynes, and aromatic diamines that achieve direct conversion from elemental sulfur to polythioamides. The MCPs went smoothly at 80 oC in dimethyl sulfoxide, which is also applicable to a range of different monomer structures, affording desired polymers with high yields (up to 97%) and high molecular weights (up to 58 400 g/mol). The resulting polymers are processable and enjoy high thermal stability, and their structures were carefully characterized through FT-IR, 1H, and 13C NMR. Inspired by the coordination between gold and thioamide moiety, the polythioamides were applied on the gold recovery from the e-waste, and exhibited efficient and selective removal performance, demonstrating a kind of promising excellent gold adsorbents.

Polythioamides from multicomponent polymerizations of elemental sulfur, diynes, and aromatic diamines

ACS Spring 2022

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