The enrichment and recovery of gold from wastewater are
an alternative
method to obtain this noble metal, which benefits reducing hazardous
emissions from the conventional ore mining process and reserving natural
gold for sustainable development. Inspired by our previous work (Lei
et al., Macromol. Rapid Comm. 2022, 2200712), four
families of microporous polyureas (mPPUs) with a large surface area
(690 m2 g–1) and abundant heteroatom
sites have been prepared via the factor-optimized
solvothermal protocol. The resultant sample NPU-A starting from 1,5-naphthalene
diisocyanate (NDI) and tri(4-aminophenyl) amine (TAPA) exhibits the
maximum Au(III) adsorption capacity of 1300 mg g–1 and high selectivity even when the Au(III) concentration is as low
as 0.1 mg L–1. This study not only demonstrates
the robustness of the high-throughput synthetic strategy but also
promotes the investigation of the structure–activity correlation
between the mPPU chemical structure and Au(III) adsorption performance.