Towards supramoleculary-organized H-Bonded materials and their integration with carbon based nanostructures

Abstract

Supramoleculary organized structures and in particular H-bonding supramolecular interactions proved to be essential in nature both in ordering structures and encoding information. In the last years a lot of efforts were dedicated to the creation of synthetic supramolecular structures for organic electronics applications. In the first part of this PhD thesis is illustrated with detailed examples the important role that H-Bond can play in organic electronic conducting materials (OFET, OLED and OPV devices). The second part of the thesis focused on the preparation of di-boronic acids as quadruple H-bonding arrays to address in the future the necessary stability, control and conformational tuning that is needed at the ordered interface. The synthesis and characterization of quadruple acceptor partner (AAAA) and boronic acids with an anthracene core decorated with methoxy and OTEG groups is reported. A preliminary UV-Vis and 1H NMR titration were performed, confirming the interaction of the two species. Finally the reduction mechanism of 1,8-dichloroanthraquinone to the corresponding anthrone in the presence of Na2S2O4 was deepen. Isolation and x-ray analysis of two intermediates in this reduction were accomplished. The third part of the presented work mainly dealt with implementation of the selectivity during the deposition of n-type fullerene clusters on a silicon p-doped silicon surface and the improvement of the efficiency of the resulting Organic Field Effect Transistor (OFET) device through increment of the ratio between n-type C60 material (three C60 moieties per molecule) for each p-doped site. Synthetic attempts towards three different structures of fullerene clusters were described. However, none of the cluster was isolated. In the fourth part of this thesis are exposed our efforts towards the construction of a novel organic photovoltaic (OPV) device based on porphyrin-C60-derived Double-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (DWCNTs) conjugates. Our focus was to get an insight on the improved structural and electronics properties of these new materials. Covaletly linked or physically adsorbed derived DWCNTs were successfully synthesized, afterwards structurally and photophysically characterized. At the moment there is an ongoing work on the construction and photophysical characterization of this new OPV device.

Date of Award	18 Jul 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Sponsors	ERC (European Union) & ARC (Actions de recherche concentrées)
Supervisor	Davide BONIFAZI (Supervisor), BAO LIAN SU (President), Steve Lanners (Jury), Alain KRIEF (Jury), Sorin Melinte (Jury) & Luigi Vaccaro (Jury)