We herein report the construction of a novel azo-linked conjugated microporous polymers (Ag@AzoTPE-CMP), which possesses permanent porous structure and Ag+ loading up of 7.62% in the skeleton as effective sorption sites. Ag@AzoTPE-CMP shows considerable adsorption capacity of iodine of 202 wt% in iodine vapor at 350 K. In addition, Ag@AzoTPE-CMP can effectively remove heavy ions from ethanol-water solution.

A series of conjugated microporous polymers containing thiophene-moieties (SCMP-COOH@1-3) was obtained by a homo-coupling polymerization reaction. Then the SCMP-COOH@1-3 were directly pyrolyzed without any templates to synthesize the porous carbon networks, named as SCMP-600@1, 2 and 3. SCMP-600@1-3 possess moderate BET surface area of 362–642 m2 g−1, have a permanent porous structure and plenty of sulfur and oxygen units in the skeletons as effective sorption sites, and display a high absorption performance for iodine vapour with an uptake up to 204 wt.%. In addition, SCMP-COOH@1-3 polymers can be used to effectively detect mercury ion from ethanol-water solution. Interestingly, under the same concentration of Hg2+ conditions, the detection ability of mercury ion of porous materials increased with the increase of the pore volumes and the specific surface.