The morphologies and fluorescence quantum yields of perylene diimide dye-doped PS and PHVB microspheres

Jia Chen; Shuoxun Jia; Xiaohuan Ji; Mohamed Nourrein; Hengxue Xiang; Zhe Zhou; Chien-Lung Wang; Bin Sun; Meifang Zhu

doi:10.1039/c8ra04158j

The morphologies and fluorescence quantum yields of perylene diimide dye-doped PS and PHVB microspheres

RSC Adv. 2018 Oct 17;8(62):35534-35538. doi: 10.1039/c8ra04158j. eCollection 2018 Oct 15.

Authors

Jia Chen¹, Shuoxun Jia¹, Xiaohuan Ji¹, Mohamed Nourrein¹, Hengxue Xiang¹, Zhe Zhou¹, Chien-Lung Wang², Bin Sun¹, Meifang Zhu¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Center for Advanced Low-Dimension Materials, Donghua University 201620 Shanghai P. R. China sunbin@dhu.edu.cn zmf@dhu.edu.cn.
² Department of Applied Chemistry, National Chiao Tung University 1001 Ta Hsueh Road Hsin-Chu 30010 Taiwan kclwang@nctu.edu.tw.

Abstract

Aggregation and continuous π-stacking have been the major obstacles hindering the fluorescence (FL) quantum yield (Φ _F) of perylene diimide (PDI) derivatives in the condensed phase. To prepare polymer microspheres with nearly unity Φ _F, in this work a POSS functionalized PDI derivative, POSS-PDI-POSS (PPP), was applied as the red fluorophore of poly(3-hydroxylbutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) (PHBV) and polystyrene (PS) microspheres. The electrosprayed PPP/PHBV and PPP/PS microspheres have unique hollow structures. Moreover, they show bright red FL under a fluorescence microscope. A photophysical study of the microspheres indicates a significant role of the polymer matrix in disrupting the aggregation state and the Φ _F of the embedded PPP fluorophore. Both the PPP/PHBV and the PPP/PS microspheres show higher Φ _F than most PDI materials in the condensed phase. The PPP/PHBV microspheres show Φ _F of 28%, whereas the PPP/PS microspheres give nearly unity Φ _F.