Month: August 2022

Zitang (Tim) received best oral presentation award in the 31st Annual ChE Graduate Student Organization (GSO) Symposium for his work in topochemical polymerization and sustainable polymers. Congratulations!

Xuyi, Zitang, and Bumjoon’s work on recyclable polymers featuring topochemically elongated and weakened carbon–carbon bonds has been published in JACS! Big congratulations!

We demonstrate a topochemical approach for creating elongated C–C bonds with a bond length of 1.57∼1.63 Å between repeating units with decreased bond dissociation energies. These materials exhibit rapid depolymerization via breakage of the elongated bond within a desirable temperature range (140∼260 °C) while otherwise remaining remarkably stable under harsh conditions. The topochemically prepared polymers are processable and 3D-printable while maintaining a high depolymerization yield and tunable mechanical properties. These results suggest that the crystalline polymers synthesized from simple photochemistry and without expensive catalysts are promising for practical applications with complete materials’ circularity. Read the paper here. Read a Blog on Medium here.

Aidan’s paper entitled “Controlling Crystallization of Quasi-2D Perovskite Solar Cells: Incorporating Bulky Conjugated Ligands” has been published in Advanced Energy Materials. Congratulations!

A bulky bi-thiophene 2T ligand is used to create vertically-aligned quasi-2D perovskite films. By starting with a poorly coordinating solvent (GBL) and adding a small amount of DMSO and methanol, it is found that vertical orientation and z-uniformity is greatly improved. These are examined using grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering and advanced optical characterizations. Solar cells with an max efficiency of 13.3% are demonstrated. The quasi-2D absorbing layers show excellent stability in moisture, remaining unchanged after hundreds of hours. Read the story here.