Tailoring functional organic materials through supramolecular chemistry

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Statement for public disclosure Finding better ways to manage our material and energy resources represents one of the most pressing challenges facing our society. Our research focuses on the design of new functional organic materials for applications such as solar cells and catalyst recycling using a combination of fundamental and applied chemical research. This work can be broadly divided into two major research themes: 1. Photoswitchable reagents and catalysts. Catalysts play a crucial role in virtually every major chemical manufacturing process. One of the difficulties associated with the use of catalysts is that they are difficult to remove from the reaction mixtures in which they work; separating these catalysts, either so that they can be reused or because their continued presence is detrimental, is often a difficult challenge that necessitates the use of costly, time-consuming and waste-producing processes. We propose to use the expertise that we have developed over the past decade in the design of photoswitchable molecules, which reversibly change their properties when irradiated with light, to develop new methods of separating catalysts from the reactions mixtures. At the heart of our approach is the creation of catalysts that can be reversibly switched between a catalytically active soluble form and an insoluble form that can be efficiently separated by simple filtration. 2. Columnar liquid crystals are a class of soft materials that have emerged as promising organic semiconductors for applications such as light emitting devices (OLEDs) and photovoltaics (solar cells). We are interested in the factors that control why some molecules, called discotic mesogens, exhibit columnar liquid crystal phases over broad temperature ranges, whereas similar molecules fail to form these phases at all. Ultimately, we are trying to answer the question of whether we can predict the macroscopic properties of a material based on the structure of its constituent molecules. Our ongoing research goal is to probe how changes in the size, shape, symmetry and electronic properties impact on the formation of these materials.