A Universal Room-Temperature Approach to Large-Area Continuous COFs Film for Photocatalytic Coupling of Amines

Large-area continuous covalent organic frameworks (COFs) film is highly desirable for the large-scale continuous selective photocatalytic coupling of benzylamine (BA); however, traditional synthetic methods for preparing COFs films still suffer from the issues of harsh reaction condition, film breakage, and high energy-consumption. Herein, a room-temperature strategy is reported for making large-area continuous imine-based COFs film through the "infiltration-reaction-assembly" mechanism, demonstrating that such strategy is quite universal for making four types of large-area COFs films. The as-made PyTTA-TPA (PyTTA: 1?3?6?8-tetrakis(4-aminophenyl)pyrene, TPA: p-benzaldehyde) COFs film exhibits excellent catalytic performance for selective photocatalytic coupling of benzylamine (BA) with a high conversion rate of 98.2% and high selectivity of 97% in 3 h, which is the best photocatalytic performance in all reported photocatalysts. In addition, the as-made COFs film is quite general for achieving photocatalytic coupling of other amine derivatives with outstanding photocatalytic performance of approximate to 100% conversion rate. Overall, this work brings a significant development for the room-temperature synthesis of large-area continuous COFs film to photocatalytic reaction.