What is it about?
Dyes included in porous matrices are interesting materials for technological applications. For example, they can be used in solar cells, drug delivery, diagnostics, and optical devices. Studying their behaviour at high pressure would be important to extend their application range beyond normal conditions, but this has never been done, so far. Here, we choose a dye, we put it inside a zeolite - a porous container with channels of molecular size - and see how the material reacts to extreme compression by using both experiments and computer simulations.
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Why is it important?
Apparently, our main result seems quite boring: we push the resistance of the material to its limit, and nothing happens. At high pressure, the arrangement of the dyes inside the pores is preserved, and the interactions governing the stability of the material become stronger. We are very happy about this, because it means that our material can withstand huge stresses without undergoing deformations and losing functionality.
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Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Unravelling the High-Pressure Behaviour of Dye-Zeolite L Hybrid Materials, Crystals, February 2018, MDPI AG,
DOI: 10.3390/cryst8020079.
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Resources
Movie of the dye-zeolite material (YouTube)
A very short movie showing the behaviour of our dye-zeolite material at high pressure, as revealed from the molecular dynamics simulations.
The Fluorenone-Zeolite material: an encapsulated nanoladder
More information on this material
New materials from zeolites and high pressure
Penetration of fluids in zeolites induced by high pressures can create new materials
The effect of pressure on zeolites
Short summary of a review article on high-pressure studies of zeolite materials
Contributors
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