Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 化學研究所 === 105 === Since the discovery of C60 in 1985, fullerenes with different sizes have received much attention, because of their unique physical properties and important applications in many aspects, such as photovoltaics, electronics and biology. However, although it is no longer a problem for large scale supply of C60, the low synthetic yield and tedious purification process of higher fullerenes have limited their accessibility as well as the effort in exploring their possibly novel properties. As synthetic host molecules capable to complex C60 and C70 have been used for their purification, we wonder if the same concept can also be applied to isolate higher fullerenes from their commercially available (but more complicated!) mixture.
Previously, we have shown that a cyclotriveratrylene (CTV)-based molecular cage that can form hemicarceplex with C70 but not C60 can be used for the direct isolation of high-purity (≥99.0%) C70 from fullerene extract. In this article, we reported the selective isolation of C76/C78 and C84 from commercially available higher-order fullerene mixture by forming the corresponding hemicarceplexes with CTV-based hosts of proper sizes. The purities of the higher fullerenes isolated are reasonably good (≥80%) and can be easily improved (≥99.5%) by a much less tedious HPLC process.
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