Synthesis of Donor-Acceptor Type Conjugated Copolymers in a Continuous Flow Reactor

초록

Continuous flow reactor is a powerful synthetic technique to overcome some chronic issues in the reactions using traditional batch reactors. Donor-acceptor (D-A) type conjugated polymer is a promising material for the future devices by having attractive properties such as flexibility, light weight, low cost, as well as easy processing. Traditionally they have been synthesized in a batch reactor. However, it is hard to avoid several issues represented by batch-to-batch variation, a phenomenon in which polymers have different material properties and causes ununiform device performance. On the contrary, the use of continuous flow reactor can provide a large-scale, safe, and controllable synthesis of donor-acceptor type conjugated polymers in a highly reproducible manner. In this work, we synthesized six D-A type conjugated copolymers chosen by paring well-known repeating units, including naphthalene diimide (NDI), benzodithiophene (BDT), and diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP). The polymers were synthesized in various reaction conditions, and the molecular weight was successfully tuned. Thus, we believe that we demonstrated the great potential of flow synthesis system to replace conventional batch system.