Subject Number : S-16-NM-0070
Support Type : 機器利用
Proposal Title (English) : The development of deformable conjugated polymers
Username (English) : C. Pan
Affiliation (English) : Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.

1. Summary
Conjugated polymers have attracted great attention due to their unique optical and electrical properties. Oceans of conjugated polymers with different structures and functions have been designed and synthesized. However, the reported CPs are ordinarily stiff and brittle.
In this project, by attaching the branched alky-chains to the common conjugated backbone[1-3], we intend to soften the conjugated polymers which are generally stiff and brittle to be deformable, flexible, and foldable.

2. Experimental
A lot of synthetic tasks were necessary in this project, so we used NMR for several times.

3. Results and Discussion

Figure 1. The chemical structure of the polymer.

Scheme 1. Synthetic scheme towards the monomer.

As shown in Figure 1, we attached the branched alkychain to the 9-positions of fluorene core to soften and isolate the conjugated polymer backbone. The bipyridine part could be played as a coordination part for various ions, such as Zn2+, Sn2+, and In3+.
We used the synthetic route as shown in Scheme 1 to synthesize the monomer. And the polymer was prepared by Suzuki coupling as shown in Scheme 2.

Scheme 2. Synthesis of the polymer.

The structure of the polymer has been characterized by using NMR, and we can assign all the signals of the NMR (Figure 2) to the polymer structure, which indicates that the polymer structure is correct.

Figure 2. 1H NMR (CDCl3, 400 MHz) of the polymer.

4. Others
We sincerely thank Dr. Takashi MINOWA, Dr.Taro TAKEMURA and Dr. Jie LI for their kind support on our projects.
References:
1. T. Nakanishi, et al., Nature Chem. 2014, 6, 690.
2. T. Nakanishi, et al., Nature Commun. 2013, 4; 1969.
3. T. Nakanishi, et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 3391.