Hexabenzocoronene@LAPONITE® ionic cage: a secondary nanoassembly as an efficient elastic ion platform

Abstract

An ion platform is a specific material featuring uneven charge distribution for intercalating and exchanging ions, but usually needs to make better compromise between ion loading and transport in practice. So, we adopted a novel strategy of supramolecular secondary self-assembly to construct an elastic cage-like ion platform comprising disc-like anthracene-decorated LAPONITE® nanoclays (LAPA) and discotic supramolecular conjugated hexabenzocoronene (HBC). Based on the flexible van der Waals forces and π–π conjugation effect, the resulting multilayer HBC@LAPA nanoassembly enabled LAPONITE® to be separated for reducing charge self-neutralization, and further intensified the overall ionic performances with excellent charge loading (−25.63 mV, 35 times) and mobility shift ((2.00 (µs⁻¹) (V cm⁻¹)⁻¹), 40 times). In particular, we integrated the HBC@LAPA nanoassemblies as an ion cage and cross-linking point into a polymeric gel system, causing a resistance decrement of two orders of magnitude. This cage-like supramolecular nanoassembly with high and unidirectional ionic conductivity is of great significance as an ion platform in battery, sensing, sieving, and ionic adsorption applications.