A triptycene derived hypercrosslinked polymer for gas capture and separation applications

This work describes facile synthesis of a porous polymeric material (T-HCP) using readily available reagents. Specifically, T-HCP is a thermally stable and hypercrosslinked polymer (HCP) that is essentially microporous with a high BET specific surface area (940 m(2) g(-1)). Triptycene based polymers are known to feature internal free volume. Thus, the incorporation of triptycene units and extensive crosslinking by an external cross-linker in T-HCP makes it a promising adsorbent for small gas capture applications. Experimental results show that T-HCP demonstrated good CO2 capture capacity of 132 mg g(-1) (273 K, 1 bar). Molecular hydrogen storage capacity of T-HCP is estimated to be 17.7 mg g(-1) (77 K, 1 bar). T-HCP revealed high CO2/N-2 selectivity (up to 63) as well as promising CO2/CH4 (up to 9.1) selectivity suggesting its potential applicability for CO2 separation from flue and natural gases.