Sulfur-Decorated Hyper-Cross-Linked Coal Tar: A Microporous Organic Polymer for Efficient and Expeditious Mercury Removal

Hyper-cross-linked microporous organic polymers are a class of porous materials that have captured widespread attention owing to their high surface areas and wide range of monomeric sources. Balancing economy with performance is the initial hurdle when designing effective hyper-cross-linked microporous organic polymers. Herein, we demonstrated an inexpensive sulfurated solvent-knitted hyper-cross-linked microporous polymer scaffold, named sulfur-decorated hyper-cross-linked coal tar (CTHP-SES), utilizing coal tar as an aromatic monomer with numerous positions for potential chelation of toxic metals, particularly mercury, from water. The resulting material illustrated selective adsorption of mercury from both water (1037 mg g–1) and the gas phase (416 mg g–1) with rapid kinetics (183.67 mg min–1 g–1), good recyclability (4 runs), and excellent stability under both strong basic and acidic conditions. CTHP-SES was able to reduce the concentration of the Hg(II) solution from 1 mg L–1 to 32 μg L–1 after 10 min due in part to the promising distribution coefficient (Kd = 2.371 × 106 mL g–1). These results show that CTHP-SES offers a promising and practical platform to cope with a variety of environmental contaminations.