Chun Tang,Meiling Su,Taige Lu,Jueting Zheng,Juejun Wang,Yu Zhou,Yu-Ling Zou,Wenqing Liu,Ruiyun Huang,Wei Xu,Lijue Chen,Yanxi Zhang,Jie Bai,Yang Yang,Jia Shi,Junyang Liu,Wenjing Hong
Nucleophilic substitution is one of the most fundamental chemical reactions, and the pursuit of high reaction rates of the reaction is one of the ultimate goals in catalytic and organic chemistry. The reaction barrier of the nucleophilic substitution originates from the highly polar nature of the transition state that can be stabilized under the electric field created by the solvent environment. However, the intensity of the induced solvent-electric field is relatively small due to the random orientation of solvent molecules, which hinders the catalytic effects and restricts the reaction rates. This work shows that oriented external electric fields applied within a confined nanogap between two nanoscopic tips could accelerate the Menshutkin reaction by more than four orders of magnitude (over 39 000 times). The theoretical calculations reveal that the electric field inside the nanogap reduces the energy barrier to increase the reaction rate. Our work suggests the great potential of electrostatic catalysis for green synthesis in the future.
We report a novel comb-shaped anion exchange membrane based on poly (2,6-dimethyl-1,4-phenylene oxide) (PPO) and 4-(dimethylamino)butyraldehyde diethyl acetal (DABDA). The Menshutkin reaction successfully introduced DABDA into the brominated PPO backbone, which was proved through FT-IR and 1 H NMR. The distinct hydrophilic/hydrophobic microphase separation structure observed by transmission electron microscope (TEM). As the increase of grafting degree, so does the water uptake, swelling ratio, hydroxide conductivity and alkaline stability. The membranes also possess good mechanical property with tensile strength from 14.2 to 38.11 MPa. This is due to the increasing number of hydroxide and unique steric hindrance effect caused the higher water uptake and higher dimensional stability. Simultaneously, especially PPO/DABDA-60 in comb-shaped membranes demonstrate an excellent long-term alkali resistance stability. In a 576-h alkali resistance stability test, the retained ionic conductivity of the PPO/DABDA-60 membrane is 96% of the initial value. The PPO/DABDA-60 is a potential candidate material for AEM.