Morphology transformation between nanofibres and vesicles controlled by ultrasound and heat in tryptamine-based assembly

Abstract

A novel low-molecular-mass organic gelator T1 containing tryptamine and sugar segments was designed and synthesised which can gelate alcohols accelerated by heat and sonication. Interestingly, morphology exchange between vesicles as precipitate and a three-dimensional gel network tuned by heating and ultrasound was observed. The mechanism was studied by IR, FL, X-ray diffraction. It was presented that the effect of ultrasound was to disturb the spontaneous self-assembly of T1 molecule, and promote the long arrangement and disordered assembly of T1 molecules into fibrous networks, thus resulting in the gelation in methanol.

Keywords:

• Organogel
• supramolecular
• ultrasound
• tryptamine
• responsive

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10610278.2015.1127375

Funding

This work was supported by the NNSFC [grant numbers 21401040, 21301047]; Xiaoli fund SW (SW31), Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province [grant numbers B2014208160, B2014208091].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.