Gelation behavior and structure transition in mixtures of disc-shape dihydrazide derivative

ABSTRACT

Gelation behavior in mixtures has been investigated based on a gelator (BP8-A), containing three di-hydrazide units as the rigid core. It was demonstrated that BP8-A was soluble in many organic solvents, such as chloroform (CHL), benzene (Ben), toluene (Tol), and tetrahydrofuran (THF) but formed gels in alcohols, except methanol (MeOH) in which precipitate was observed. We developed a simple but effective method for preparation of BP8-A gel in different solvents at room temperature without heating-cooling process, that is, injection of certain amount of methanol (volume ratio between 8:2 and 7:3) into BP8-A solutions in CHL, Ben, Tol, and THF. Xerogels from MeOH/CHL, MeOH/Ben, MeOH/Tol, and MeOH/THF showed crystalline feature. The films from BP8-A xerogels in the mixtures are superhydrophobic with the contact angles (CAs) higher than 140°.

KEYWORDS:

• Hydrogen bonding
• organogel
• solvent effect
• superhydrophobic

Funding

Financial support for this work was provided by National Science Foundation of China (Project no. 51103057, 51073071, and 21072076) and Project 985-Automotive Engineering of Jilin University.

Supporting information

The synthetic route for BP8-A and FT-IR spectroscopic results for xerogels from mixtures are given in SI.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for this work was provided by National Science Foundation of China (Project no. 51103057, 51073071, and 21072076) and Project 985-Automotive Engineering of Jilin University.