Photoresponsive, Self-assembled Organic Networks
Supervisor: Dr Alex Loch and Prof Dave Adams
School: Chemistry
Description:
This project will investigate the optical, morphological, and mechanical changes of photoresponsive hydrogels and their corresponding xerogels. The gels will be utilised as a low-density scaffold, to which existing chemical sensing systems will benefit from the scaffold’s inherent properties. The key aspect of this project is the integration of a photoresponsive receptor into the gel – something that can be exploited to change the mechanical, optical, morphological, or electronic state of the scaffold when in the solid or semi-solid state (xerogel). This has yet to be targeted to improve the detection limits of chemical sensors (i.e., greater surface area leads to higher sensitivity; a change in the sensors morphology results in higher selectivity towards a specific analyte). The first step of this process is to develop and characterise a gel network that will be suitable for integration into a sensing system and then to determine how this responds to an external stimulus (herein light). The proposed research programme will therefore look at the fabrication of a photoresponsive gel and how its behaviour is translated from a hydrogel to a xerogel.