The Effect of the Polyaromatic Hydrocarbon in the Formation of Fullerenes

Solution-Processed Semiconductor Materials as Cathode Interlayers for Organic Solar Cells

Cathode interlayers (CILs) play a crucial role in improving the photovoltaic efficiency and stability of OSCs. CILs generally consists of two kinds of materials, interfacial dipole-based CILs and SPS-based CILs. With good charge transporting ability, excellent compatibility with large-area processing methods, and highly tunable optoelectronic properties, the SPS-based CILs exhibit remarkable superiorities to their interfacial dipole-based counterparts in practical use, making them promising candidate in developing efficient CILs for OSCs. This mini-review highlights the great potential of SPS-based CILs in OSC applications and elucidates the working mechanism and material design strategy of SPS materials. Afterward, the SPS-based CIL materials are summarized and discussed in four sections, including organic small molecules, conjugated polymers, nonconjugated polymers, and TMOs. The structure-property-performance relationship of SPS-based CIL materials is revealed, which may provide readers new insight into the molecular design of SPS-based CILs. The mechanisms to endow SPS-based CILs with thickness insensitivity, resistance to environmental erosion, and photo-electric conversion ability are also elucidated. Finally, after a brief summary, the remaining issues and the prospects of SPS-based CILs are suggested.

Research Progress on Adsorption and Separation of Petroleum Hydrocarbon Molecules by Porous Materials

Petroleum is an indispensable chemical product in industrial production and daily life. The hydrocarbon molecules in petroleum are important raw materials in the organic chemical industry. The hydrocarbons currently used in industry are usually obtained by fractional distillation of petroleum, which not only consumes more energy, but has poor separation selectivity for some hydrocarbons. Adsorption separation technology has many advantages such as energy saving and high efficiency. It can adsorb and separate hydrocarbon molecules in petroleum with low energy consumption and high selectivity under mild conditions. In this paper, the research progress of adsorption and separation of hydrocarbon molecules in petroleum is reviewed, and various new catalysts and the rules of adsorption and desorption are analyzed.

Synthesis of Fullerenes from a Nonaromatic Chloroform through a Newly Developed Ultrahigh-Temperature Flash Vacuum Pyrolysis Apparatus

The flash vacuum pyrolysis (FVP) technique is useful for preparing curved polycyclic aromatic compounds (PAHs) and caged nanocarbon molecules, such as the well-known corannulene and fullerene C₆₀. However, the operating temperature of the traditional FVP apparatus is limited to ~1250 °C, which is not sufficient to overcome the high energy barriers of some reactions. Herein, we report an ultrahigh-temperature FVP (UT-FVP) apparatus with a controllable operating temperature of up to 2500 °C to synthesize fullerene C₆₀ from a nonaromatic single carbon reactant, i.e., chloroform, at 1350 °C or above. Fullerene C₆₀ cannot be obtained from CHCl₃ using the traditional FVP apparatus because of the limitation of the reaction temperature. The significant improvements in the UT-FVP apparatus, compared to the traditional FVP apparatus, were the replacement of the quartz tube with a graphite tube and the direct heating of the graphite tube by impedance heating instead of indirect heating of the quartz tube using an electric furnace. Because of the higher temperature range, UT-FVP can not only synthesize fullerene C₆₀ from single carbon nonaromatic reactants but sublimate some high-molecular-weight compounds to synthesize larger curved PAHs in the future.