Climate change is a significant global challenge and a serious threat to the planet. Several strategies have been proposed to reduce the emission of anthropogenic CO2 (carbon dioxide) and to explore the use of CO2 as an abundant feedstock to produce sustainable fuels. Capturing CO2 using porous polymers and converting it into valuable chemical feedstocks is a promising solution to this problem. Crosslinked porous polyimides (pPIs), a type of porous organic polymer (POP), offer great potential for CO2 capture and conversion, owing to their porous nature and excellent chemical and thermal stabilities. However, incompatibility of solvents during the condensation of the material can yield into lower surface areas and by that limits the total gas uptake. The Bristol-Xian-Jiaotong (BXJ) approach to tune solvent-polymer compatibility can be employed to optimise the synthesised pPIs and their resulting functionality. In this approach inorganic salts are used to tune the porosity and enhance the surface area by tuning the compatibility of the reaction solvent and the growing porous polymer. By implementing the BXJ approach, pPIs were optimised to enable CO2 capture of up to 14 wt%. Additionally, the pPIs were successfully utilised to electrocatalytically reduce CO2 to methanol and formate with Faradaic efficiencies of up to 85% and 95%, respectively. Further investigation shows that pPIs can incorporate CO2 into epoxides (epichlorohydrin) to form cyclic carbonates ((chloromethyl)ethylene carbonate) with 98% conversion.

Perylene- and naphthalene-based porous polyimides for CO2 capture and conversion

Where thousands of chemistry professionals meet to share ideas and advance scientific and technical knowledge. Spring 2023 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch at the end of March.

ACS Spring 2023

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.