Caking‐Inspired Cold Sintering of Plastic Supramolecular Films as Multifunctional Platforms

Abstract

Caking of powder materials is undesired in various industries, and for thousands of years people are fighting against caking. Herein, the principle of caking is employed to create macroscopic plastic supramolecular films through a cold sintering process. A nanometer-sized, irregular coordinating cluster is first generated with a bulky head surfactant and multifunctional ligand, and the addition of metal ions immediately leads to amorphous white precipitates. Upon adsorbing moisture, a rearrangement of the molecules in the precipitates results in cold sintering, so that the particles in the precipitates grow into a transparent macroscopic film. The mechanical strength of the film is comparable to plastics, but allows welding and molding with finger at ambient temperature in moist environment. Mechanical tests suggest the supramolecular plastic does not fatigue even after several tens circles' remolding, indicating their superior material engineering capability. This strategy can be extended to different chemistries to fabricate films with different mechanical strength. Various functional components can be doped into the resultant films, rendering them a platform toward multifunctional materials, such as luminescent devices or sensors for pollution gases. The current strategy opens up a new vista in material science is expected.

A Visible‐Light‐Regulated Chloride Transport Channel Inspired by Rhodopsin

“…Therefore, the study of visible light responsive membrane channel is not only significant to understand the biological functional of signal transduction, but also for the development of interdisciplinary research areas such as bio‐materials, [6] photoelectric conversion [7] and optical bio‐sensors [8] . Since natural protein channels within cell membranes are fragile and unstable for vitro studies, [9] it is necessary to fabricate artificial membrane channels to study the influence of visible light on ion channel transport behavior (Scheme 1). [10, 11] …”

Densification and fine grain formation mechanisms of BaTiO3 ceramics consolidated by self-assembly sintering

“…Generally, the methods, including the hot pressing sintering, spark plasma sintering, cold sintering, two-step sintering and electric field sintering, usually involve sintering equipment and complex microstructure design (such as core-shell structure design) [6][7][8][9][10]. From the perspective of energy saving and convenience, it is of great significance to develop a sintering method that can be used under normal conditions in order to obtain fine-grained ceramics with high relative density [13][14][15].…”

Generating Circularly Polarized Light from Clustering‐Triggered Emission Using Solid Phase Molecular Self-Assembly

“…It still remains an insurmountable challenge to align the clusteroluminogens in a CTE system. Herein, we report the first case of CPL generated from CTE using the strategy of solid phase molecular self-assembly (SPMSA) proposed by us [44][45][46] . In this strategy, a precipitate composed of a pair of oppositely charged polyelectrolyte and amphiphile was first generated in water, which was further subjected to mild mechanical pressure to facilitate merging of the nanometer-sized hydrophobic domains into mesophases.…”