2021 IRG-2: Electrically-Fueled Active Materials
Dissipative Self-Assembly
Fuel-driven self-assembly is ubiquitous in natural systems, leading to complex phenomena including cell motility, cell division, camouflage, and self-healing. Creating synthetic equivalents of these biological assemblies is challenging but offers the reward of active, dynamic materials.
Electrically-Fueled Assembly
Current synthetic dissipative self-assembly systems are fueled either by chemicals or light. Here, the UCI MRSEC team have developed the first electrically-fueled dissipative system that offers rapid kinetics, directionality, and unprecedented spatiotemporal control, closely mimicking systems found in nature. The electrochemically-fueled active, dynamic, and directional assembly is shown in Figure 1. Excitingly, the system demonstrates an unprecedented level of spatiotemporal control of self-assembly (Figure 2).
The team is now working on expanding this chemistry to a completely waste-free dissipative system. The transient behavior of dissipative self-assembly using dual electrocatalysts without generating any waste has been preliminarily demonstrated (Figure 3).
S Selmani, E Schwartz, JT Mulvey, A Grosvirt-Dramen, W Gibson, AI Hochbaum, JP Patterson, R Ragan, Z Guan (University of California, Irvine)
Selmani S, Schwartz E, Mulvey J, Wei H, Grosvirt-Dramen A, Gibson W, Hochbaum AI, Ragan R, Patterson J, Guan Z,*“Electrically fueled active supramolecular materials” Journal of the American Chemical Society, 144, 7844-7851 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.2c01884