Executive Summary : | India is emerging as a global innovation hub in sustainable technologies, focusing on environmental protection and human health. The Global Sanitation Centre of Excellence (GSCoE) in IIT Palakkad has gained expertise in sanitation, hygiene, and water purification. The industrial revolution has improved India's social and economic status, but the rise of manufacturing, processing, and mining industries has led to contamination of surface and groundwater with hazardous pollutants, threatening freshwater supply. Therefore, developing efficient methods for sequestration and removal of contaminants is crucial. This proposal aims to develop porous organic polymers (POPs)-based molecular adsorbents for task-specific fluorescence sensing and removal of emerging organic contaminants from wastewater. The main focus is on designing and synthesizing shape-persistent organic macrocycles (SPOMs) via reversible dynamic covalent chemistry and post-manufacture SPOMs with different reactive and self-assembling functional moieties. The newly designed POPs and COFs will be synthesized under various methodologies and characterized by powder diffraction techniques, BET surface areas, thermogravimetric, FT-IT, and solid-state NMR analyses. The porous polymers will be used as potential molecular adsorbents for selective sequestration and efficient removal of emerging organic contaminants from wastewater. Organic pollutants will be catalytically converted into non-toxic species or value-added commodities. The outcome of this proposal will result in the generation of novel porous polymer-based adsorbents and molecular filters for task-specific adsorption and removal of hazardous chemical substances and emerging organic pollutants for water purification. |