Pyrene and Bipyridine-based Covalent Triazine Framework as Versatile Platform for Photocatalytic Solar Fuels Production

The ability to molecularly engineer materials may be one of the most powerful tools in favor of high performing heterogeneous catalysts. Porous organic polymers stand out as photocatalysts due to their high chemical stability, outstanding optoelectronic properties and their easy and tunable syntheses. In photocatalysis, the insertion of photosensitizing π-extended molecules into a molecularly well-defined donor-acceptor junctions is supposed to increase the cata-lytic activity, but yet remain experimentally underdeveloped. Here, we present a pyrene-based Covalent Triazine Framework (CTF) synthesized through a polycondensation approach, which was designed to contain a molecularly defined pyrene-triazine-bipyridine donor-acceptor-acceptor triad as the repetition unit of the CTF. The CTF is an efficient photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution from water reaching a production rate of 61.5 mmolH2/h/gcat. Moreover, the same CTF can easily be used as porous macroligand for an organometallic Rh complex to efficiently catalyze the carbon dioxide photoreduction into formic acid under visible light.