Out-of-equilibrium self-assembly approaches for new soft materials

Living creatures exists for an important part out of soft material, such as skin, organs and cells, that are out-of-equilibrium formed by the self-assembly of molecular building blocks. Natural materials are continuously active with dynamic processes occurring, such as growth, shrinkage and transport mechanisms under the consumption of energy....

Self-Assembly of Facial Oligothiophene Amphiphiles

Organized ?-conjugated oligothiophene structures in water are highly promising building blocks to create a vast variety of smart and functional electronic systems. Such materials already found application in biological and chemical sensors, organic light-emitting diodes and photovoltaic devices. The high level of molecular order in such devices...

Fluorinated building blocks for next-generation polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells

The purpose of this thesis is to design, create and study basic building blocks for the construction of self-assembled nanostructured electrodes and membranes for PEMFC. The research described deals with the synthesis of polymerizable fluorosurfactant (1) and its non-polymerizable analogue (2) and the study of their self-assembly properties....

Multicomponent and Dissipative Self-Assembly Approaches: Towards functional materials

The use of self-assembly has proven to be a powerful approach to create smart and functional materials and has led to a vast variety of successful examples. However, the full potential of self-assembly has not been reached. Despite the number of successful artificial materials based on self-assembly, the corresponding structures do not compete...

Curved Amphipathic Oligothiophenes: Curvature directed S.A. with applications in energy transfer systems and membrane curvature detection in living cells

We have designed and synthesised a new class of molecules which self-assemble based on hydrophobic interactions with an additional driving force for influencing the overall aggregate morphology, namely, molecular curvature. The structure is build from subunits which are substituted with either hydrophilic or hydrophobic substituents. In water,...

Highly Mobile Triphenylene Based Organogel Networks

Organogels and liquid crystals are both well known classes of materials covering a broad spectrum of molecules, structures and morphologies. In this thesis characterization of novel triphenylene based organogels is described in connection with the mesomorphic liquid crystalline properties of the pure materials. In the course of this study...

Fundamentals of tri-block copolymer self-assembly in solutions, and its relation to nano-templating

The purpose of this thesis is to obtain a better understanding of the formation mechanism of mesoporous silica materials, such as SBA-15 that use block copolymers as templating agents. Despite the fact that these materials are now extensively synthesized, the fundamental role of the different synthesis variables has not been determined on the...