Date: Wednesday, March 6th, 2017 

Time: 11:00 AM 

Location: Building 4, Room 125​

School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering,

Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 

Wuhan, China​ 

Hypercrosslinked microporous polymers (HCPs) are currently an important class of porous polymer materials and receiving great interest due to their advantages such as high surface area, moderate synthetic conditions and diverse building blocks. Although numerous kind of HCPs were developed during the few years, but still the synthetic routes are very limited. Based on the need of functional groups like chloromethyl group on the polymeric precursors and monomers eventually decrease the diversification of resulting material. Moreover, the hydrogen chloride generated from chloromethyl group during the Friedel-Crafts alkylation reaction also needs to be considered for large scale industrial production and environmental issues. We developed a versatile strategy for preparing HCPs by using the simple one-step Friedel-Crafts reaction. In this approach, formaldehyde dimethyl acetal was used as an external cross-linker and various aromatic monomers can be directly crosslinked to form the highly porous networks. This "knitting" method has produced aromatic heterocycle-based MOPs with BET surface areas up to 726 m2 g-1, with the H2 and CO2 uptake of 1.11 wt% (77 K/1.13 bar) and 12.7 wt% (273 K/1 bar), respectively. Specifically, pyrrol-based network, Py-1, shows an extraordinarily high selective adsorption of CO2 over N2 (about 117 at 273 K).

This "knitting" strategy can also be used to prepare heterogeneous catalyst.

​Bien Tan is the professor of School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST). He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the College of Materials at South China University of Technology. He then joined in Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials for postdoctoral research in National Laboratory of Advanced Composites (1999-2001). He worked as a PDRA at The University of Liverpool (2001-2007). He then returned to China and joined HUST in September 2007 as a professor. In December 2009, Tan was awarded New Century Excellent Talents in University by the Ministry of Education, and in the same year he was awarded Chutian Scholar Distinguished Professor by Hubei province. He has so far published more than 100 journal papers in high impact journals including Nature Nanotechnology, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Advanced Materials and 5 book chapters, approximately half of these being in the last 5 years. Current impact factor of Tan is more than 550. 

​