De novo synthesis of a covalent organic framework featuring high iodine uptake for Li-ion battery: A new route for transforming hazardous into treasure

Abstract

Recently, Water pollution and environmental pollution due to excessive iodine contamination received widespread attention in terms of human health and environmental protection. Iodine sequestering is highly critical, both in vapor and aqueous medium, to mitigate the huge amount of radioactive iodine which is generated from the nuclear power plant. Herein, a new cost-effective and scalable route has been designed to synthesize robust Imine bond COF that has been employed for Iodine capture. This study shows that rapid and selective capture towards I3-, more than >98% removal of I3- from the water was achieved. The high uptake capacity of 4.92gg-1 was observed in the vapor phase under nuclear fuel reprocessing conditions, and remarkable performance was achieved on a wide range of water systems. The iodine-captured COF demonstrates a notable enhancement in the electrical conductivity and distribution coefficient (Kd∼104 mL/g), revealing the excellent binding affinity for I3-. Furthermore, iodine captured COF was utilized for Li-ion battery application, interestingly, it shows the excellent specific capacity of 120 mAh/g, thus it is an outstanding cathode material. The viability of scaling up lithium-iodine batteries for practical energy storage can be aided by hazardous and waste cathode material.