Porphyrin self-assembly nanomaterials, as visible-light harvesting materials in the artificial photosynthetic systems that mimic natural photosynthesis, have been well designed and developed via molecular self-assembly with non-covalent interactions including electrostatic force, metal-ligand coordination, π-π stacking, hydrogen bonding as well as host-guest interactions. And porphyrin self-assembly with well-defined structures have drawn much attention in a wide range of fields including light-energy conversion, photonics as well as photodynamic therapy due to their attractive photophysical, photochemical and electronic properties in the visible-light region. We report a surfactant self-assembly induced micelle encapsulation method to fabricate porphyrin nanocrystals using the optically active precursor zinc porphyrin (ZnTPP). Through confined non-covalent interactions of ZnTPP within surfactant micelles, nanocrystals with a series of morphologies including nanodisk, tetragonal rod, and hexagonal rod, as well as amorphous spherical particle are synthesized with controlled size and dimension. A phase diagram that describes morphology control is achieved via kinetically controlled nucleation and growth as shown in Figure 1. Due to the spatial ordering of ZnTPP, the hierarchical nanocrystals exhibit both collective optical properties resulted from coupling of molecular ZnTPP and shape dependent photocatalytic activities in photo degradation of methyl orange (MO) pollutants and hydrogen production.

Controlled self-assembly of porphyrin and catalytic applications

255th National Meeting (2018)

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