Recently, Professor Li Chenghui and his team from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering published a paper titled “Tough, Reprocessable and Recyclable Dynamic Covalent Polymers with Ultrastable Long-Lived Room-Temperature Phosphorescence” on Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
The abstract of the paper is as following:
Room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) polymers, whose emission can persist for a long period after photoexcitation, are of great importance in practical applications. Herein, dynamic covalent boronic ester linkages with internal B-N coordination are incorporated into commercial epoxy matrix. The reversible dissociation of B-N bonds upon loading provides an efficient energy dissipation pathway for the epoxy network, while the rigid epoxy matrix can inhibit the quenching of triplet excitons in boronic esters. The obtained polymers exhibit enhanced mechanical toughness (12.26 MJ m-3), ultralong RTP (τ = 540.4 ms) and shape memory behavior. Notably, the RTP property shows no obvious decrease upon prolonged immersion in various solvents due to the robust networks. Moreover, the dynamic bonds endow the polymers with superior reprocessablity and recyclability. Based on these novel properties, their potential applications for information encryption and anti-counterfeiting were demonstrated.
1. boronic acid esters and their dynamic polymers based on the o-hydroxy group promotion mechanism.
2. Six-membered cyclic boronic acids based on intramolecular B-N coordination and their dynamic cross-linking binders.
3. (a) Schematic diagram of the synthesis route of organic phosphorescent polymers and their network structures; (b) Mechanical tensile curves of polymeric materials; (c) Schematic diagram of the mechanism of ligand bond toughening.
4. Characterization of phosphorescent properties of polymeric materials and demonstration of various applications.
5. Demonstration of the shape memory function of polymer materials and the coupling with RTP function.
Translator: Shao Yihang
Editors: Guo Ankang, Shao Yihang
