The Study On Self-assembly And Nanomaterials Of Amphiphilic Polyamino Resorcinarenes

As a third generation supramolecule, calixarene can be chemically modified easily, which is of interest for its promising applications in several fields. Self-assembled calixarenes have achieved remarkable advancements, which has generated a wide variety of objects with nanoscale structure including vesicle, capsule, nanotube, and nanobelt. However, these reported assembled objects are predominantly generated in organic solvents since most of modified calixarenes are often insoluble in water and a comparatively few number of studies have been carried out in aqueous media. In this work, we aim to perform systematical investigation on the formation mechanism of resorcinarene-based self-assemblies in water and present a simple approach for the fabrication of resorcinarene-stablized nanoparticles. The main achieved research results are as follows:1. Amphiphilic resorcinarene-based multiwalled microtubes, micrometers in diameter and centimetres in length, were generated in water. Their self-assembly properties were investigated using TEM, SEM, AFM, DLS, XRD, UV-vis and FT-IR techniques. From these studies, the structures of hydrophilic aminoamide groups are critical for the self-assembly of resorcinarene into microtubes in aqueous media. Furthermore, our study manifests a feasible method, which aims to completely change the structure from a microtube to a sheet-like morphology via selectively eliminating key groups in hydrophilic moieties.2. Gold nanoparticles were prepared by ethyleneglycol (EG) reducing gold chloride under microwave irradiation. The EG-stabilized gold colloids varied from red to blue with increasing amounts of EG, due to particle aggregation. Addition of the resorcinarene deaggregated nanoparticles aggregation under microwave irradiation and greatly improved their dispersion stability in aqueous solutions. These effects are likely due to that resorcinarene molecules can easily form a bilayer protecting structure on the surface of gold nanoparticles, which plays a critical role in the color-change process of the EG-stabilized gold colloid.3. The syntheses of various calixarene-capped nanoparticles including silver, platinum and palladium nanoparticles in aqueous solution are tested for the first time. The products were fully characterized with UV-visible, FT-infrared spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy. By utilizing as-prepared microtube as templates, hybrid materials combining metal nanoparticles and organic microtubes were obtained.