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ABSTRACT
A series of fluorine tail-terminated alkoxy and alkyl cyanobiphenyl compounds and some cyano-p-terphenyl derivatives were synthesised and mesogenic properties described. Comparison with the non-fluorinated K series and M series indicates that the terminal fluorine atom generally decreases the transition temperatures and, more interestingly, depresses the formation of a smectic phase. Several binary LC mixtures formed by the fluorine tail-terminated compounds were found exhibiting promising room temperature nematic phases with wide ranges. The mixture F7OCB and F8OCB shows homeotropic ordering at the metal salts-decorated surfaces and planar ordering at the free surface, which may have potential application in designing a more sensitive and faster LC system to targeted analytes.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (DMREF grant DMR-1435195) and the Army Research Office (W911NF-14-1-0140). Part of the computational work conducted by T.S. and M.M. in this study was carried out through external computational resource facilities at: the DoD High Performance Computing Modernisation Program (US Air Force Research Laboratory DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (AFRL DSRC), the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), and the Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (Navy DSRC), ARONC43623362), supported by the Department of Defense; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) through the U.S. DOE, Office of Science under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231; and the Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) through the U.S. DOE, Office of Science under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.