Building metal-functionalized porous carbons from microporous organic polymers for CO2 capture and conversion under ambient conditions

Metal-functionalized porous carbons derived from microporous organic polymers remain highly desired for their intriguing physical and chemical properties. Currently, their preparation still suffers from tedious and costly synthetic procedures. Herein, we report a one-step in situ method for preparing metal-functionalized porous carbons via directly pyrolyzing a mixture of metal salts and a pre-designed microporous organic polymer. The as-made carbons exhibited significantly improved surface areas (up to 1886 m2 g−1) and an exceptionally high CO2 adsorption capacity (up to 25.9 wt% at 273 K/1.0 bar) when compared to their analogs (1100 m2 g−1, 13.8 wt%) prepared through a conventional post-blending method. The metal-functionalized porous carbons could serve as efficient catalysts for converting CO2 into cyclic carbonates with a yield of up to 99% at 25 °C and 0.1 MPa, surpassing the analog carbon (54%) and most known porous catalysts. These results imply that in situ embedding metal active sites into porous carbons would offer a potential prospect for the efficient structural and functional design of high-performance catalyst systems.