| Conjugated materials have received much attention lately owing to their photophysical and electrochemical properties that make them suitable for use in plastic electronics applications. The challenges for the creation of new materials are to have reproducible synthetic methods that lead to easily purified products, as well as the intelligent design of molecules that have the desired properties. It is important do develop a synthetic method to created conjugated materials that doesn't require harsh reaction conditions or expensive metal catalysts. Azomethine bonds are a good way to resolve this problem, since they are formed by a simple condensation between an amine and an aldehyde with water as the only by-product. They can also be synthetised with little to no purification steps and they are isoelectronic to vinyl bonds that are well-known and understood. It is also of crucial importance to understand clearly the effect of adding electron-donating and electron-withdrawing groups in the conjugated backbones of such materials.;The main objective of this project is to better comprehend the effect of the added 3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene (EDOT) electron-donnating group on the opto-electronic properties of azomthine triads for the incorporation of these materials in stable and efficient electrochromic devices. Therefore, the photophysical and electrochemical properties of these materials will be presented. A series of vinyl analogs will be synthesized to confirm their isoelectronic behavior to azomethines in an opto-electronic point of view. These new vinyl compounds lead to the synthesis of a new amino-thiophene derivative that will be used as a building block for on-surface polymerization of azomethines. These polyazomethines will be incorporated in electrochromic devices and their performances will be discussed. Finally, since the azomethines are known not to be highly fluorescent, the fluorescence enhancement of push-pull bithiophene systems will be presented. The knowledge obtained about fluorescence can be used to enhance the fluorescence quantum yields of azomethines. This thesis will therefore explore diverse tuning of material's properties to better understand how to cleverly design conjugated materials.;Keywords: Chemistry, Synthesis, Azomethines, Conjugated Materials, Photophysics, Electrochemistry, Electrochromism, Fluorescence. |
