Direct Arylation Polymerization for Synthesizing a Library of Conjugated Porous Polymers Containing Thiophene-Flanked Building Blocks

Thiophene-flanked pi-conjugated building blocks are often used in the design of linear conjugated polymers as they leverage the reactivity of thiophene in numerous C-C coupling reactions to include a variety of donor and acceptor molecules in the conjugated backbone. However, this design strategy has been rarely used for synthesis of conjugated porous polymers (CPPs) until recently. In this article, we report facile synthesis and characterization of a library of CPPs synthesized via a versatile synthetic scheme of C-H direct arylation polymerization that involves commercially available aryl bromides and thiophene-flanked arenes. This synthetic scheme not only is atomically efficient compared to conventional couplings such as Suzuki, Stille, and Sonogashira coupling but also broadens the scope of building blocks to enable fine control of chemical structures, optoelectronic properties, and porosities that are important for applications such as photocatalysis.