A backbone design principle for covalent organic frameworks: the impact of weakly interacting units on CO2 adsorption

Abstract

Covalent organic frameworks are designed to have backbones with different yet discrete contents of triarylamine units that interact weakly with CO₂. Adsorption experiments indicate that the triarylamine units dominate the CO₂ adsorption process and the CO₂ uptake increases monotonically with the triarylamine content. These profound collective effects reveal a principle for designing backbones targeting for CO₂ capture and separation.