Research Projects

Since the discovery of LCs in 1888, discotic LCs have revolutionized commercial LCs by introducing disk-shaped molecules. This molecular design has led to significant growth in the development of novel materials and understanding structure-property relationships. The structure of discotic LCs plays a major role in applications, as disk-shaped molecules stack into 1D columns, which can be altered by substituents through non-covalent force of attraction. These columns are organized in a 2D lattice with columnar long axis parallel to each other. The presence of incompatible units in the discotic, core, and aliphatic tails leads to nanosegregation, which has a strong impact on LC formation. A large number of disk-shaped molecules, such as triphenylene, coronene, hexabenzocoronene (HBC), perylene, tetraphenylene, triazine, porphyrins, phthalocyanine, triazine, and tricycloquinoxaline, have been synthesized and characterized to evaluate their mesomorphic behavior. The presence of heteroatoms in aromatic compounds makes them superior than aromatics, but fused heterocyclic compounds are relatively less studied due to their synthetic challenge and poor yield. To induce mesomorphism in fused heterocyclic systems using multicomponent reactions, researchers have prepared liquid crystals from six member 1,3-oxazine, which can provide more flexibility and synergize mesomorphic behavior. The researchers chose to use heterocyclic derivatives scheme 1 based system to induce LC properties.