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Research Interests : chiral inorganic gelators (metallogel), Superabsorbent Materials, Structural Supramolecular Materials Chemistry (Coordination, Crystallography, Chiro-optical effect) based on chiral ligands, Quantum dots etc. 

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Summary of Research Interest
 

Gels have attracted substantial interest owing to their fascinating morphology, optical, rheology and various physical properties. In the present era, gels are directly applicable in human daily routine life like medicine, cosmetics, electronic devices, tissue engineering etc. The direct applications as well as interesting chemistry of gels motivated me to establish my research lab for the synthesis of chiral inorganic gelators. Now the question arises why chiral and inorganic with gel? Chirality tunes the morphology and exhibits the chiro-optical effects. The incorporation of metal with gelators may be associated with additional physicochemical properties such as magnetism, color, rheology, adsorption, emission, catalytic activity and redox behavior. To the date very few chiral inorganic gels are reported because of difficulty in the synthesis of enantiopure chiral gelator molecules as well as the incorporation of metal more often than not inhibits the gelation. Thus, I am actively involved in development of various kinds of materials (particularly gel materials) with special attention to - (i) Superabsorbent, (ii) Conductive, (iii) Charge transfer, (iv) Aggregation induced emission, (v) Chiro-optical, (vi) photophysical, (vii) morphological, (viii) Rheological and (ix) crystal engineering importance.

Metallogel based applications
At a Glance

Research Highlights 

Superabsorbent LMW Hydrogel Design

 Metallogel towards  Electrochemical semiconductor application

The emergence of soft electronics has triggered a tremendous requirement of gel phase electrochemical semiconducting materials for the development of electrochemical transistors, ionic diodes, soft actuators, sensors, etc. Another important criterion for the development of these devices is the existence of mixed ionic–electronic conduction (MIEC) properties in electrochemical semiconductor materials to facilitate the ion and electron transport at the electrode–electrolyte interface during the redox process. Metallogels are of great potential for the development of such electrochemical semiconductors, wherein, the metal ions themselves are responsible for gel formation as well as intrinsically induce ionic conductivity without the loss of gel-associated properties.
Electronic conductivity in metallogels arises due to the facilitation of electron transport via ligand–ligand and metal–ligand pathways and it can be further improved by implementing various molecular engineering strategies, such as development of gelator molecules consisting of π-conjugated systems, and through increasing aromatic interactions in gelator molecules via π–π stacking. In order to achieve such materials, our laboratory is focused on the utilization of metallogels for the development of mixed conductive electrochemical semiconductors (MIEC).

Heat triggered molecular restructuring and gel-gel-gel transformation in metallogels

Nature upholds many self-regulatory assemblies which adapt themselves according to the external adverse change and modulate their molecular and/or supramolecular structures to transform into another structural form through dynamic evolution. These natural systems tend to self-regulate themselves by means of structure, chemical species or self-assembly dynamics to resist the external stimuli. Moreover, the exploitation of sacrificial building blocks is crucial to many biological self-assembly phenomena, e.g., transcription, actin fibre formation, and microtubule growth. In these processes, a pristine molecule gets dynamically sacrificed in an out-of-equilibrium fashion to generate new hierarchical self-assembly. However, the synthetic self-assembled structures are often devoid of such complex self-regulatory properties and hence are rarely reported.
Keeping this in mind, our approach has shown that metal ion and heat assisted molecular dissipation can actively control supramolecular self-assembly at different hierarchical levels. Thus, facile fabrication of such self-adaptive metallogels can be utilised to decipher the complexity of natural metal-assimilated self-regulatory assemblies.

Superhydrophobic CDs with Solid state fluorescence: New generation soft materials

Carbon dots are a novel class of carbonaceous soft materials which has navigated multidisciplinary research interest globally. Generally CDs exhibit wide spectrum of fluorescence covering complete visible region which provides alluring opportunities  to use them in drug delivery, bio-imaging, anticounterfeiting fields. However, most carbon dots fluoresce only in solution state and upon drying they lose the fluorescence. Quenching of the CDs’ luminescence in solid-state has extensively hindered their application in LED and anticounterfeiting technology. To use their fluorescence in solid state, strategies such as using polymer matrices or doping polymer chain during CD synthesis are considered. In this direction, direct generation of CDs which exhibit solid state fluorescence without external agents are still scarce in literature.
Nature has always astonished humans with her magnificent mechanisms; super hydrophobicity is just one of them. Animal and plant kingdom judiciously exploits the benefit of having hydrophobic surface to protect themselves from adverse effects. Super hydrophobicity, on the other hand, is an intriguing research area and is used to induce self-cleaning, anti-icing, anti-fogging properties in materials. The analytical report published by Mordor intelligence (2018) predicted that the superhydrophobic coating market might increase at the rate of 25.6% of the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) during 2019−2024. Many carbonaceous materials are nowadays emerged to be suitable candidate to fabricate superhydrophobic materials, among which, Carbon dots are very recently realized and there is a huge scope to explore this branch.
Hence, to overcome the above mentioned intriguing challenges, our lab has focused on designing novel CDs which are exhibit solid state fluorescence as well as superhydrophobicity.  Development of fluorescent superhydrophobic coating has potential to pave the way for new generation smart materials.
 

Superhydrophobic CDs with Solid state fluorescence: Latent Fingerprint Detection

Fingerprints are a unique characteristic of individuals that remain unchanged throughout a person’s life. As an information feature that can serve as personal “ID cards” and “information banks”, fingerprints are valuable evidence in criminal cases. Latent fingerprints (LFPs) are formed due to the fingers touching an object, as they are covered with sweat secreted by the sweat pores. Even when the hand is thoroughly wiped and dried, if one person puts his hand on his face or hair, it is likely to leave LFPs on the place where he touches, especially objects with a smooth surface such as metal, glass, ceramics, and painted wood. LFPs are the most common type of fingerprint in crime scenes and nearly invisible to the naked eye. Hence, the development of LFPs is crucial for the solving of criminal cases. In case of finger print detection, there are various levels in terms of detection efficiency by present materials. The level 1 is the typical features of fingerprints (such as rings and eddies), level 2 is the macro details of the fingerprint (eye, lake, island, ridge fragments, and endpoint), and level 3 is the microscopic details of the fingerprint (such as pores). Not all available materials can achieve the aforementioned detailing present in the fingerprints and hence quest oof novel materials are still ongoing. In this regard, our laboratory has initiated dedicated thorough study on fingerprint detection by superhydrophobic fluorescent carbon dot powder. he carbon dots as synthesized exhibited promising results detecting islands, ridge ending, core print, ridge dots, bifurcation and print termini. As additional benefits, these dots are easy to synthesize, economic for mass production, highly fluorescent and efficiently detecting up to level 3 details of latent fingerprint. Therefore, we can definitely envision these novel materials in future real time application of LFP detection in forensic science.
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