Easy Fabrication of Amorphous Covalent Organic Nanospheres Using Schiff-Base Chemistry for Iodine Capture

Designing a strategy for easy fabrication of amorphous porous organic polymers (POPs) with regularly nanospherical structure using common chemical raw materials is highly imperative to promote the practical application for iodine capture. Uniform covalent organic nanospheres (CONs), defined as CON-TT, were easily prepared at room temperature via a Schiff base condensation reaction of tri(4-aminophenyl) methane (TAPM) and terephthalaldehyde (TPA) catalyzed by acetic acid. The obtained CON-TT exhibits a uniform nanospherical shape, high specific surface area, effective imine sorption sites and abundant benzene rings. An excellent reversible iodine adsorption capacity of 4.80 g g^-1 is achieved, which can be attributed to the hybrid of physisorption and chemisorption process. We anticipate that this work can provide general guidance for the industrial large-scale preparation of other CONs for iodine capture.