Fibers with Hyper-Crosslinked Functional Porous Frameworks

The incorporation of robust porous frameworks into polymer fibers with handleable morphologies and flexible chemical compositions exhibits significant advantages for device fabrication in a wide range of applications. However, the soft linear polymeric chains of the fibers make the generation of nanopores extremely challenging. Herein, a facile synthetic strategy based on a combination of functional monomer grafting and hyper-crosslinking technology is developed for the porous engineering of polymeric fibers. In this methodology, the nanoporous framework originating from the hyper-crosslinking of aromatic monomers is covalently grafted onto fibers, which is beneficial to retaining their unique fiber morphology and to preserving their excellent mechanical properties. Moreover, this promising protocol can be further extended to the porous functionalization of polymeric matrices with diverse morphologies for target-specific applications.