Novel Hydroquinone-Alumina Composites Stabilizing a Guest-Free Clathrate Structure: Applications in Gas Processing.

Organic clathrates formed by hydroquinone (HQ) and gases such as CO and CH are solid supramolecular host-guest compounds in which the gaseous guest molecules are encaged in a host framework of HQ molecules. Not only are these inclusion compounds fascinating scientific curiosities but they can also be used in practical applications such as gas separation. However, the development and future use of clathrate-based processes will largely depend on the effectiveness of the reactive materials used.

New Insights on Gas Hydroquinone Clathrates Using in Situ Raman Spectroscopy: Formation/Dissociation Mechanisms, Kinetics, and Capture Selectivity.

Hydroquinone (HQ) is known to form organic clathrates with different gaseous species over a wide range of pressures and temperatures. However, the enclathration reaction involving HQ is not fully understood. This work offers new elements of understanding HQ clathrate formation and dissociation mechanisms.

Effect of the synthetic methodology on molecular architecture: from statistical to gradient copolymers.

Styrene-butyl acrylate (S-BuA) copolymers were synthesized by nitroxide-mediated controlled radical polymerization using an alkoxyamine as an initiator. Using different synthetic methodologies, statistical copolymers were be obtained by batch nitroxide mediated polymerization while the gradient composition was a forced gradient by continuous addition of S during BuA polymerization (semi-batch process). These gradient copolymers have been studied by H NMR and size exclusion chromatography to characterize the gradient composition molecular structure.

New theoretical and experimental infrared results on formaldehyde in solution.

An extension of our combined procedure to determine a complete quartic force field and to resolve a vibrational problem thanks to a variational treatment is proposed for quantitative calculations of vibrational spectra in solution. Energies and gradients are obtained through a polarizable continuum model (PCM), the so-called self-consistent isodensity (SCI)-PCM. We present in this paper new experimental results dealing with formaldehyde in solution in cyclohexane, chloroform, THF, acetonitrile, DMSO and water; the obtained vibrational spectra are then compared with CCSD(T)/cc-pVQZ calculations.