Conjugated macro–microporous polymer films bearing tetraphenylethylenes for the enhanced sensing of nitrotoluenes

Conjugated microporous polymer films (CMP-Fs) bearing tetraphenylethylene moieties showed aggregation-induced emission behavior, which can be utilized for the emission quenching-based sensing of nitrotoluenes. In this work, macroporous CMP-Fs (MA-CMP-Fs) were engineered using assembled silica spheres as templates. The MA-CMP-Fs showed much better sensing performance toward nitrotoluenes with Stern–Volmer constants ( K SV ) of up to 1.39 × 10 5 M −1 , compared with CMP-Fs ( K SV up to 5.57 × 10 4 M −1 ). The sensing performance of the MA-CMP-F is superior to those of recent emissive CMP materials ( K SV in the range of 2.08 × 10 3 to 6.78 × 10 4 M −1 for nitroarenes) in the literature, which is attributable to the additional macroporosity of the CMP-F. Also, we demonstrated that various functional CMP films with macroporous inner structures can be developed using tailored building blocks.