Chemical kinetic mechanisms and scaling of two-dimensional polymers via irreversible solution-phase reactions

Generalized Model for Inhibitor-Modulated 2D Polymer Growth to Understand the Controlled Synthesis of Covalent Organic Frameworks

Two-dimensional (2D) polymers, also known as 2D covalent organic frameworks (COFs), are increasingly finding use in applications such as membrane separations, catalysis, and energy conversion. Current research is focused on the development of new synthesis routes for COFs and obtaining a mechanistic understanding of the growth process to control it in a better manner. In this regard, synthesis methods such as reversible polycondensation termination use monofunctional inhibitor species to achieve a controlled growth rate for COFs. However, so far, the role of the inhibitors in modulating the kinetics of COF growth is inadequately understood. In this work, inspired by the Mayo-Lewis framework, we develop a generalized kinetic model to describe the synthesis of a 2D COF monolayer. Our model involves six parameters corresponding to the rate constants of attachment and detachment of monomer and inhibitor species, as well as enhancement factors that quantify the effect of the local coordination environment of the attaching/detaching species on the reaction kinetics. We measure the inhibitor concentration-dependent growth kinetics of the COF experimentally and fit our model to experimental yield data, with the same parameters working across multiple inhibitor concentrations. As the growth process is inherently stochastic, we use this knowledge to develop a comprehensive kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulation of 2D COF synthesis, demonstrating that scaled rate constants are required in the inherently local KMC simulations rather than those obtained from the global kinetic model. The KMC simulations point to an inverse flake size-inhibitor concentration relationship, in agreement with experiments, indicating that flake sizes could be precisely regulated by changing the inhibitor concentrations. Overall, our work promises to improve the understanding of 2D COF synthesis and will help in controlling the growth process to obtain the desired flake size distribution and product morphology.

Learning effective dynamics from data-driven stochastic systems

Multiscale stochastic dynamical systems have been widely adopted to a variety of scientific and engineering problems due to their capability of depicting complex phenomena in many real-world applications. This work is devoted to investigating the effective dynamics for slow-fast stochastic dynamical systems. Given observation data on a short-term period satisfying some unknown slow-fast stochastic systems, we propose a novel algorithm, including a neural network called Auto-SDE, to learn an invariant slow manifold. Our approach captures the evolutionary nature of a series of time-dependent autoencoder neural networks with the loss constructed from a discretized stochastic differential equation. Our algorithm is also validated to be accurate, stable, and effective through numerical experiments under various evaluation metrics.

Irreversible synthesis of an ultrastrong two-dimensional polymeric material

Polymers that extend covalently in two dimensions have attracted recent attention^1,2 as a means of combining the mechanical strength and in-plane energy conduction of conventional two-dimensional (2D) materials^3,4 with the low densities, synthetic processability and organic composition of their one-dimensional counterparts. Efforts so far have proven successful in forms that do not allow full realization of these properties, such as polymerization at flat interfaces^5,6 or fixation of monomers in immobilized lattices^7-9. Another frequently employed synthetic approach is to introduce microscopic reversibility, at the cost of bond stability, to achieve 2D crystals after extensive error correction^10,11. Here we demonstrate a homogenous 2D irreversible polycondensation that results in a covalently bonded 2D polymeric material that is chemically stable and highly processable. Further processing yields highly oriented, free-standing films that have a 2D elastic modulus and yield strength of 12.7 ± 3.8 gigapascals and 488 ± 57 megapascals, respectively. This synthetic route provides opportunities for 2D materials in applications ranging from composite structures to barrier coating materials.