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Molecular engineering of ordered piezoelectric sulfonic acid-containing assemblies

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journal contribution
posted on 2024-10-23, 10:49 authored by Hui Yuan, Pierre-Andre CazadePierre-Andre Cazade, Shuaikang Zhou, Linda, J. W. Shimon, Chengqian Yuan, Dan Tan, Cunshun Liu, Wei Fan, Vijayakanth Thangavel, Yi cao, Damien ThompsonDamien Thompson, Xuehai Yan, Rusen Yang, Bin Xue, Ehud Gazit

Sulfonic acid-containing bioorganic monomers with wide molecular designability and abundant hydrogen bonding sites hold great potential to design diverse functional biocrystals but have so far not been explored for piezoelectric energy harvesting applications due to the lack of strategies to break the centrosymmetry of their assemblies. Here, a significant molecular packing transformation from centrosymmetric into non-centrosymmetric conformation by the addition of an amide terminus in the sulfonic acid-containing bioorganic molecule is demonstrated, allowing a high electromechanical response. The amide-functionalized molecule self-assembles into a polar supramolecular parallel β-sheet-like structure with a high longitudinal piezoelectric coefficient d11 = 15.9 pm V−1 that produces the maximal open-circuit voltage of >1 V and the maximal power of 18 nW in nanogenerator devices pioneered. By contrast, molecules containing an amino or a cyclohexyl terminus assemble into highly symmetric 3D hydrogen bonding diamondoid-like networks or 2D double layer structures that show tunable morphologies, thermostability, and mechanical properties but non-piezoelectricity. This work not only presents a facile approach to achieving symmetry transformation of bioorganic assemblies but also demonstrates the terminal group and the property correlation for tailor-made design of high-performance piezoelectric biomaterials.

Funding

Twinning for excellence in biophysics of protein interactions and self-assembly

European Commission

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SSPC_Phase 2

Science Foundation Ireland

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History

Publication

Small, 2024, 20, 2309493

Publisher

Wiley and Sons Ltd

Other Funding information

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Israel project (grant no. 3–18130) within the China-Israel Cooperative Scientific Research (no. 2022YFE0100800) Twin2pipsa – Twinning for excellence in biophysics of protein interactions and self-assembly grant (101079147), Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant No.2022YFE0100800), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 52192613, no. 51973170). H.Y. acknowledges the George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University for financial support. D.T. acknowledges support from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under award number 12/RC/2275_P2 (SSPC) and supercomputing resources at the SFI/Higher Education Authority Irish Center for High-End Computing (ICHEC)

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