Research Projects

It is planned to prepare stimuli responsive soft materials from multi-components; such that the properties of the individual components can be incorporated in the designed soft material. Hence, the soft materials can be visualized in a broader aspect from their application point of view. Pre-prepared self-assembled discrete metallo-cages, cucurbiturils and electron deficient bipyridinium entities will be used as the components of for the preparation of the target soft material. In practice, Pd(II) and Pt(II) based self-assembled metallo-cages will be constructed which will be utilized as building block towards the formation of the metallo-gels. To make the matallo-gel responsive towards external stimuli, for instance light, heat and chemical agents, electron rich moieties such as anthracene and photochromic moieties such as azobenzene will be incorporated in the building blocks of the cages. Thus, the sol-gel phase transition of the designer metallo-gel will be explored by the addition of external stimuli like light, heat and chemical agents. Furthermore, the stimuli-responsive multi-componental metallo-gel can used for different applications including host-guest study and catalysis. Furthermore, the ligands in the pre-prepared cages can be redesigned by replacing CB entity with crown-ethers, pillar[n]arene and other light responsive units for developing varieties of multi-componential stimuli responsive soft materials. Thus, the proposed research directions diversify from the synthetic chemistry into the areas of materials chemistry. Therefore, the successful execution of the proposal could result in multidisciplinary impact beyond the boundary of chemical sciences.