This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). A new era in displays, lighting and electronics is opening with the introduction of devices fabricated using high performance organic semiconductors. Opportunities include low power consumption, large area lighting, intelligent data tags for supply chain monitoring and ubiquitous, personalised devices that can be wearable, printable and fabricated in large numbers using lower cost facilities than conventional silicon fabs. Scaleable synthetic routes need to be developed that preferably lead to a diversity of material structures and products of the desired purity and performance. In general, commercial polymerization catalysts or precursors are employed that are not necessarily optimized for the reactions required to assemble conjugated oligomers and polymers, hence high loadings of catalysts are used that can lead to significant levels of impurities in the products that are difficult to remove.
With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the work of Professor Oscar Navarro's group of the University of Hawaii in a collaborative program with Professor Mike Turner's group of the University of Manchester, UK. Professor Navarro's group is developing new transition metal-based catalytic systems for C-C and C-X bond formation (X = N, O, S) and Professor Turner's group has complementary interests in the synthesis of conjugated oligomers and polymers, the characterization of these materials, their formulation for solution processing and the fabrication of OFET and photovoltaic devices using these materials. This collaborative work focusses on optimizing catalyst systems for the preparation of arylamine and carbazole based polymers and investigating the performance of the resulting materials.
