Bimetallic Complexes for Catalysis, Imaging and Information Processing

聚合物是长分子链。它们是由许多小分子（“单体”）连接在一起制成的，就像一根绳子上的珠子。聚合物是非常有用的，因为它们可以表现出广泛的性质。因此，它们在我们的日常生活中随处可见：从塑料袋，食品包装和床垫，到我们的洗发水和牙齿填充物。我们目前制造聚合物的方法的一个问题是，用于生产聚合物的单体几乎完全来自原油。这意味着他们有相当大的碳足迹，随着人们对气候变化的认识不断提高，使聚合物生产更加绿色变得越来越重要。化学家们正在研究一种聚合物生产的替代方法，该方法涉及用二氧化碳取代聚合物中一半的石油衍生单体。二氧化碳作为化学构件是有吸引力的，因为它是无毒的，可再生的，并且作为各种工业过程的副产品，价格低廉。这种方法以两种方式减少聚合物的碳足迹。首先，因为你使用较少的石油衍生化学品，所以在制造单体时释放到环境中的二氧化碳较少。其次，事实上，你使用二氧化碳作为单体，在聚合物中每个重复单元节省了一个二氧化碳分子。因此，这种方法是使聚合物更环保的重要一步。虽然二氧化碳是一种优秀的化学结构单元，但它非常不活泼。这使得其难以并入聚合物中。为了解决这个问题，需要一种“催化剂”。催化剂是一种加速化学反应而不会在过程中被耗尽的化学物质。例如，汽车中的催化转化器，它使用贵金属作为催化剂，将有毒的污染气体转化为更温和的气体。自20世纪60年代末以来，世界各地的化学家已经开发出许多催化剂，用于将二氧化碳纳入聚合物中。进一步的改进主要集中在制造更快生产聚合物的催化剂上。其他目标包括使催化剂更耐用，以延长其寿命，降低高温和高压要求，以降低其运行成本，并允许对现有制造工厂进行改造。这需要详细了解催化剂的工作原理。这种理解可以让我们微调催化剂设计，以提高其性能。该项目的另一个长期目标是使用与二氧化碳反应时会改变颜色的催化剂，从而实现气体的视觉检测。由于我们的工作涉及对痕量二氧化碳具有高度反应性的催化剂，因此可以进行非常灵敏的检测。二氧化碳传感有着广泛的应用，包括监测空气质量、农业应用以及在医学中测量病人呼吸中的二氧化碳含量。该项目属于EPSRC“制造未来”研究领域的福尔斯。

Polymers are long molecular chains. They are made by linking together lots of small molecules ("monomers"), like beads on a string. Polymers are very useful, due to the wide range of properties they can exhibit. As such, they are found everywhere in our daily lives: from plastic bags, food packaging, and mattresses, to our shampoos and dental fillings. One problem with our current methods of making polymers is that the monomers used in their production are almost exclusively derived from crude oil. This means that they have considerable carbon footprints, and with growing consciousness around climate change it is becoming increasingly important to make polymer production greener.Chemists are investigating an alternative method for polymer production that involves replacing half of the oil-derived monomers in a polymer with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is attractive as a chemical building block because it is non-toxic, renewable, and, as a by-product of various industrial processes, inexpensive. This method reduces the carbon footprint of polymers in two ways. Firstly, since you since you use less oil-derived chemicals, less carbon dioxide is released into the environment while making the monomers. Secondly, the fact you are using carbon dioxide as a monomer saves one molecule of carbon dioxide per repeated unit in the polymer. Therefore, this method is an important step forward in making polymers greener.While carbon dioxide makes an excellent chemical building block, it is very unreactive. This makes it difficult to incorporate into polymers. To counteract this, a "catalyst" is needed. A catalyst is a chemical that speeds up a chemical reaction without being used up in the process. An example is the catalytic converter in your car, which uses precious metals as catalysts to turn toxic, pollutant gases into more benign ones.Since the late 1960s, chemists around the world have developed many catalysts for incorporating carbon dioxide into polymers. Further improvements largely centre around making catalysts that produce polymer more quickly. Other aims include making the catalysts more robust to increase their longevity, and lowering the high temperature and pressure requirements to lower their running costs and to allow retro-fitting of existing manufacturing plants. This requires a detailed understanding of how the catalysts work. This understanding can allow us to fine-tune catalyst designs to improve their performance.Another, long-term aim for this project is to use catalysts which change colour upon reaction with carbon dioxide, allowing visual detection of the gas. Since our work involves catalysts which are highly reactive to trace quantities of carbon dioxide, this could allow for very sensitive detection. Carbon dioxide sensing has a variety of applications; including monitoring air quality, agricultural applications, and in medicine to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in a patient's breath.This project falls within the EPSRC "manufacturing the future" research area.