Fullerenes and Our Lives

[CarbonCopy]

I've heard a lot about the properties of fullerenes, so could someone please brief me about them and tell me how they can be used to improve our daily lives. And, how come they have not been put to use already ?

[Enthalpy]

For such a general question, I suggest to have a look at Wiki first.

[mississippichem]

I've heard a lot about the properties of fullerenes, so could someone please brief me about them and tell me how they can be used to improve our daily lives. And, how come they have not been put to use already ?

 

Your signature tells me you are an organic chemist. The following post assumes an organic chemist level of knowledge.

 

As someone who has done some work with C₆₀, C₈₀, their derivatives and a zoo of endohedral metallo-fullerenes, I can tell you that they have great potential in many areas; especially as additives that can greatly increase dielectric or capacitance properties.

 

However, I can also tell you that they are hell to work with. They are barely soluble in everything and not very soluble in anything. They are expensive to purchase commercially and difficult to produce reproducibly in the lab. Zapping a graphite rod with enough current to fry anything doesn't tend to scale up well as you might imagine.

 

If you want to use them for any kind of materials they need to be functionalized, for example hydroxylated, halogenated, or reacted with long urethanyl linked alkenyl chains to prepare them for polymerization reactions. The functionalization procedures are always rife with trouble. Most of the processes involve ball-milling (at least 24 hours worth), extreme reaction conditions and LARGE columns for purification in post.

 

If you do manage to functionalize any of these devils (we did), then characterizing your products is another conundrum. We once spent over two months just developing a methodology to access the degree of hydroxylation (number of carbon atoms hydroxylated) of simple C₆₀(OH)_n. NMR gives a multiplet mess with and a lot of overlapping peaks. Quantitative IR showed a highly non-linear curve fit for degree of functionalization versus percent absorption. UV-vis proved to be just worthless for a multitude of reasons. We ended up using wet methods but the process chemists we talked to said "forget about it" with respect to any technique like that seeing the light of day in any kind of industrial scale procedure.

 

So yes, the potential applications for fullerenes are huge and they are an active area of research, but we are a LONG way from making any of this commercially viable or even viable at all for the mass production.

[Moontanman]

mississippichem, do you know of anyone working with Boron bucky balls?

[CarbonCopy]

1351278305[/url]' post='710562']

Your signature tells me you are an organic chemist. The following post assumes an organic chemist level of knowledge.

 

I'm not an organic chemist, I'm a student studying ocher and it's awesome. But, I do understand what you are saying. Anyway, how can your research improve our daily lives.

[mississippichem]

mississippichem, do you know of anyone working with Boron bucky balls?

 

I don't know anyone personally. But I've recently read a paper at arXiv about spontaneous symmetry breaking in the structure of B₈₀ cages. The paper was actually published in 2007 so I can't believe I've missed it until recently but I find it quite interesting as this is the kind of chemistry that I'm most into.

 

Link

 

Gopakumar G.; Nguyen M.T.; Caulemans A.; arXiv.org 2007

 

I'm not an organic chemist, I'm a student studying ocher and it's awesome. But, I do understand what you are saying. Anyway, how can your research improve our daily lives.

 

Well, our work was more from a methodology standpoint than actual application though the funding was through the US Army and the work was done with future dielectric applications in mind. I'm sure the army had a specific application in mind because they tend to not give out money just based on "wow that's cool" ideas.

 

Many kinds of electronics utilize dielectric materials for some thing or another. We used DMA (look it up, really cool technique) to measure things like dielectric storage and loss on materials that incorporated some of the functionalized endohedral metallo-fullerenes as monomers in copolymers (I'm not really at liberty to talk about the other monomers, additives in the materials, or the details about the nature of the encapsulated metal species ) so I'm sure that some of the applications the army had in mind had something to do with dielectric storage or fancy capacitors.

Edited October 27, 2012 by mississippichem