Effect of catalyst concentration and reaction time on one-step synthesized hypercrosslinked polyxylene

A meso- and microporous hypercrosslinked polyxylene was synthesized via Friedel-craft reaction in the presences of iron(III) chloride as a Lewis acid catalyst. Dichloro-p-xylene, which has both benzene ring and chlorine functional groups, was used as monomer for the one-step synthetic process. A different amount of catalyst was used for polymerization and hypercrosslinking reaction. Yield and properties of the hypercrosslinked polyxylene were affected by the concentration of catalyst. Maximum yield of hypercrosslinked polyxylene was 65.4% above 30 wt%/monomer. Maximum Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area was 1168.37 m 2 /g at 40 wt%/monomer. Micropore volume and peak diameter at maximum differential volume, determined using Horvath-Kawazoe (H-K) method, were 0.2324 cm 3 /g and 0.55 nm, respectively.