A class of organic cages featuring twin cavities
Zhenyu Yang, Chunyang Yu, Junjie Ding, Lihua Chen, Huiyu Liu, Yangzhi Ye, Pan Li, Jiaolong Chen, Kim Jiayi Wu, Qiang‐Yu Zhu, Yu‐Quan Zhao, Xiaoning Liu, Xiaodong Zhuang, Shaodong Zhang
Abstract
Abstract A variety of organic cages with different geometries have been developed during the last decade, most of them exhibiting a single cavity. In contrast, the number of organic cages featuring a pair of cavities remains scarce. These structures may pave the way towards novel porous materials with emergent properties and functions.We herein report on rational design of a three-dimensional hexaformyl precursor 1 , which exhibits two types of conformers, i.e . Conformer-1 and -2, with different cleft positions and sizes. Aided by molecular dynamics simulations, we select two triamino conformation capturers (denoted CC). Small-sized CC-1 selectively capture Conformer-1 by matching its cleft size, while the large-sized CC-2 is able to match and capture both conformers. This strategy allows the formation of three compounds with twin cavities, which we coin diphane. The self-assembly of diphane units results in superstructures with tunable proton conductivity, which reaches up to 1.37×10 -5 S cm -1 .