Solvothermal synthesis of porous conjugated polymer with high surface area for efficient adsorption of organic and biomolecules

Aimed to prepare high efficient dye sorbent and control water pollution, herein we utilized solvothermal method to synthesize porous polyimide (PI) polymer with a large surface area using DMSO as solvent. Unlike the solid-state thermal polymerized PI with low surface area of 5 m²g⁻¹, this PI material prepared in DMSO solvent possessed a large surface area of 430 m²g⁻¹, which was beneficial for adsorption of organic dye in waste water, achieving a max MO adsorption of 200 mg g⁻¹ three times higher than that of multiwalled carbon nanotube. The adsorption kinetics of dye molecules on PI was investigated in detail and the R² value of 0.99071 for pseudo-second-order model confirms the adsorption was fitted best with Langmuir isotherm.