Molecular Engineering in D‑π-A-A-Type Conjugated Microporous Polymers for Boosting Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution

Conjugated microporous polymer (CMP) photocatalysts with donor-π-acceptor (D-π-A) or donor-acceptor (D-A) structures have garnered great attention for solar-driven hydrogen generation because of their inherent charge separation nature and high surface area. Herein, we design a series of D-π-A-A-type CMP photocatalysts to uncover the influence of the content of the dibenzo[b,d]thiophene-S-S-dioxide (BTDO) acceptor on the photocatalytic activity. The results demonstrate that the acceptor content in the D-π-A-A-type CMP photocatalysts affects the electronic structure, the availability of reaction sites, and the separation between light-generated electrons and holes, which mainly determine the photocatalytic performance for H2 release. Benefiting from the synergy of light absorption, hydrophilicity, and active sites, the bare polymer PyT-BTDO-2 with an optimized BTDO content exhibits a high H2 production rate of 230.06 mmol h–1 g–1 under simulated sunlight, manifesting that the strategy of D-π-A-A structural design is efficacious for boosting the photocatalytic performance of CMP photocatalysts

Inhibition of Heterogeneous Ice Nucleation by Bioinspired Coatings of Polyampholytes

Control of heterogeneous ice nucleation (HIN) on foreign surfaces is of great importance for anti-ice-nucleation material design. In this work, we studied the HIN behaviors on various ion-modified poly­(butylene succinate) (PBS) surfaces via chain-extension reaction. Inspired by antifreeze proteins (AFPs), the PBS-based polyampholytes, containing both negative and positive charge groups on a single chain, show excellent performance of ice nucleation inhibition and freezing delay. Unlike the extremely high price and low availability of AFPs, these PBS-based polyampholytes can be commercially synthesized under mild reaction conditions. Through water freezing tests on a wide range of substrates at different temperatures, these PBS-based polyampholytes have shown application value of tuning ice nucleation via a simple spin-coating method