Research

NUS chemists made C-C coupling based 2D polymer

NUS chemists made C-C coupling based 2D polymer
Professor Kian Ping Loh and PhD student Liu Wei in the Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore, applied an ingenious strategy based on endogenous polymerization, carried out without catalyst, solvent or initiator, to make 2-D polymer based on C-C coupling reactions.
They discovered that pre-ordering well-designed, flat monomers into a single crystal structure can lead to a 2D crystalline aromatic polymer upon thermal annealing. The achieved polymeric sheets are parallel and can be readily exfoliated into micrometer-sized sheets with nanometer thickness, similar to the case of single-layer graphene. This approach paves the way towards the controlled synthesis of extended crystalline 2D conjugated materials for various applications. Due to its intra-sheet conjugation and ordered open 1D channel, the 2D polymer fabricated by Loh et. al. exhibits unprecedented cycle stability and rate capability when applied as an anode in an ambient temperature sodium cell. The work is published in Nature Chemistry. Link

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