Towards the design of supramolecular metal coordinated conjugated polymers: Modeling and experiment

Design of supramolecular metal coordinated conjugated polymers is the subject of this research. The specific class of conjugated polymers considered here is composed of bidentate chelating ligands; such as 2,2' -bipyridine and 1,10-phenanthroline. Vinylene spacer groups are used to provide conjugation along polymer chains.;The primary motivation of this study is to improve the bulk conductivity of conjugated polymers. Bulk conductivity is composed of inter-chain and intra-chain conductivities. The conducting polymer literature has focussed on increasing intra-chain conductivity. In this research, conjugated polymer systems have been designed to address both intra- and inter-chain conductivities. By coordinating ruthenium to the polymer backbone containing bidentate chelating ligands, bridges are created between multiple conjugated segments. These bridges provide a low energy conduction pathway.;Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of conjugated conducting polymers. Chapter 2 includes a review of the literature relating to a class of recently studied polymers: Supramolecular polymers with transition metals. This class of polymers is most relevant to the topic of this research. Chapter 3 presents the research focus of this dissertation and the motivation for designing supramolecular metal coordinated conjugated polymers. Chapters 4 and 5 provide a discussion of the synthesis and study of conjugated polymers based on 2,2' -bipyridine and 1,10-phenanthroline respectively. Chapter 4 also presents a comparative study of 2,2'-bipyridine-5,5' -vinylene with and without coordination to ruthenium. Chapter 6 provides a computational evaluation of model systems to identify potential candidates for the design of supramolecular metal-coordinated conjugated polymers. It also includes a discussion of viable computational methods for the specific class of systems discussed here. Chapter 7 presents a summary of this research along with a discussion of concluding remarks and suggested future work and finally, chapter 8 provides the experimental details.