Thermoreversible organogelation has been the focus of many studies due to their possible use in oil spill recovery and drug delivery. Though many compounds have been shown to be organogelators, very few contain silicon. A structure-function relationship study was conducted using silicon as a branching point to increase the number of alkyl tails in the organogelator. The highly branched bisurea compounds were synthesized by reacting silyl chlorides with amino alcohols followed by reaction with bisisocyanates to create potential gelators (figure 1). Infrared spectroscopy has shown both hydrogen bonding between the ureas and entanglement of the alkyl tails. Infrared spectroscopy was used to determine the number of conformational defects in the alkyl chains and the degree of hydrogen bonding in the urea groups.

Using infrared spectroscopy to examine the effect of branch and linker lengths on the properties of trialkylsilyl bisurea organogelators

247th National Meeting (2014)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.