A Novel Dynamic Covalent Approach to Shape-Persistent Organic Molecular Cages and 2D Ladder Polymers.

摘要

There has been a long-standing interest in synthesizing covalently-bound single-sheet two-dimensional (2-D) polymers due to their potential applications in gas separation, chemical sensing, and ultrasensitive sensors for pressure changes, in addition to many other membrane applications. However, the controlled growth of covalently bonded 2-D polymers remains a major challenge that scientists have yet to overcome. In contrast to utilizing 1-D or 2-D building units in conventional polymer synthesis, we have been working on constructing ordered porous 2-D polymers by assembling well-defined, rigid, 3-D organic cage building blocks. Such a bottom-up “cage-to-polymer” strategy would enable the efficient encoding of both dimensional and functional information into the final polymers. In this thesis, the efforts towards constructing cage building blocks by utilizing one-step, high-yielding dynamic covalent chemistry (DCC) instead of conventional multi-step, low-yielding covalent synthetic procedures are presented. Synthesizing 2-D polymers/oligomers in a controlled fashion is also discussed.