Project
Project description
The Calvino group is interested in adressing the enviromental issue related to the limited renewability of crosslinked polymer materials. Thanks to high availability, environmental-friendliness and ability to trigger specific chemical reactions, we chose light as a central point of our studies. Noticeably, coumarine and its analogues are known to undergo a reversible light-mediated dimerisation and reversion. Based on this idea, my project consists in synthesising, testing and optimising the photochemical performances of such photosensitive motifs, implementing them in polymer matrices and optimising the parameters of the corresponding fabrication procedures. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate that coumarine analogues can be used to access high molecular weight polymer material by light-trigerred step growth polymerization of telechelic oligomer. I want to show that the so-obtained polymer materials can be efficiently renewed on-demand into their initial constituents using a dissimilar irradiation.
Project outcome
We were interested in addressing the environmental issue related to the limited renewability of polymer materials. Thanks to its high availability, environmental friendliness and ability to trigger specific chemical reactions, we chose light as a central point of our studies. Noticeably, Coumarin and its analogues are known to undergo a reversible light-mediated dimerization and reversion. Based on this idea, we were interested in synthesizing, testing and optimizing the photochemical performances of such photosensitive motifs and implementing them in polymer matrices. We were able to demonstrate the state-of-the-art photo performance of these photo motifs in solution. Apart from driving the separated photoreactions to outstanding conversions and kinetics, we demonstrated the amazing cycleability that the photo motifs enable. First results for the usage of the photo motifs in polymer matrices provided encouraging results for the continuation of the project.
Supervisor
Dr. Céline Calvino