Novel Design, Synthesis, and Environmental Applications of Covalent Organic Frameworks

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Background

Nowadays, environmental pollution is one of the challenges to global sustainable development. To tackle pollution, there must be a two-step process. Firstly, to timely monitor and recognize various pollutants even at trace concentration, and secondly, to reduce the discharge of pollutants and degrade the pollutants to innocuous substances such as CO2, H2O, and inorganic salts. In this regard, covalent organic frameworks (COFs), as a type of promising star materials, have demonstrated their power in both environmental analytical chemistry and environmental remediation chemistry.

COFs have emerged and developed rapidly in the past two decades. As a kind of pure-organic, crystalline, and tunable porous materials, COFs exhibited high specific surface area, customizable pore structures and sizes, selective adsorption sites for analytes and reactants. Moreover, due to the plethora of organic monomers and linking chemistry, COFs can be fine-tuned and modified accurately at the molecular level to adopt the specific substrates. This would facilitate the interpretation of the structure-activity relationship and optimization of the fittest catalysts or sensing materials.

Although COFs have garnered considerable success in gas adsorption and separation, energy storage, optoelectronics, sensors, and heterogeneous catalysts, it is still in its infancy phase compared with other porous materials and crystalline materials. Specifically, in environmental chemistry, COFs are still rarely focused on and investigated due to the challenges in the synthesis, characterizations, modeling, and difficulty in the black-box of structure-activity relationship.

This Research Topic aims to emphasize several important aspects of COFs materials applied in environmental chemistry. The design and synthesis of novel COFs structure is certainly the center of the chemists' focus. Multiple approaches, including de-novo assembling of functional monomers, choosing new linking chemistry, researching new topologies, and developing post-modification strategies, are important.

Characterization and modeling are indispensable due to the difficulty in obtaining single-crystal COFs. Furthermore, this Topic would emphasize their environmental applications, including environmental monitoring and treatment of pollutants. Both sensing materials and catalytic degradation materials would be focused. All in all, we will provide a function-directed perspective in this research topic by discussing how to realize the optimal activity from looking back to optimize the corresponding COFs structure. We welcome the submission of Original Research, Review, Mini-Review, Perspective articles on themes including, but not limited to:
• Design, synthesis, characterization, and modeling of novel functional COFs for environmental applications
• Investigations of tunable luminescence, conducting and catalytic properties of COFs
• Novel spectrochemical and electrochemical techniques used for the study of COFs in environmental applications
• Studies on sensing (metal ions, anions, and organic pollutants) COFs by fluorescence or electrochemical approaches.
• Applications of novel COFs in selective adsorption and photocatalytic pollutants degradation (toxic heavy metal, antibiotics, polyaromatics, and organic halides pollutants

Keywords: covalent organic frameworks, design, synthesis, characterizations and modelling, environment remediation， environmental pollutants monitoring

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