On Tuesday, February 21st the NanoLeaves Team was a guest on a scientific news program on the National TV channel RaiTre. The name of the program is TG Leonardo. The interview explains the potentialities of our research on lignin and its perspective application in organic electronics. Available at this link

During the month of July the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry in Pisa hosts Dr. Mihai Irimia-Vladu from Johannes Kepler University of Linz as a visiting fellow. We are happy to welcome Mihai and share with him inspiring ideas and research! In this picture, all our group is with Dr. Irimia-Vladu and Dr. Jeannette J. Lucejko, assistant professor of Analytical Chemisty.

From June 29^th to July 1^st our Department hosted the international conference Chemistry For the Future 2022. Chemistry for the Future (CFF) is a yearly international conference on the frontiers of Chemical Research. It is organized by the Doctoral School in Chemistry and Materials Science (DSCM) and the International Office of the Dipartimento di Chimica e Chimica Industriale (DCCI) of Università di Pisa.

It has been the first big event in presence hosted by our Department after the pandemic, and a great occasion for our PhD students to show up their research.

The NanoLeaves group has contributed to this event with an oral communication presented by Dr. Rosarita D’Orsi, entitled “Lignin: a bio-based dielectric polymer for organic field-effect transistors”, a work in collaboration between our group and the Linz Institute of Organic Solar Cells (LIOS, Johannes Kepler University, Austria).

Our PhD candidate Laura Spagnuolo presented her first poster communication, entitled “Extraction of cellulose nanocrystals from lignocellulosic biomass: application of chemical and enzymatic hydrolysis”.

It was a fantastic experience and we look forward to the next edition of Chemistry For the Future!!

Last May 5th Alessandra Operamolla, from the NanoLeaves Group, gave a lecture to high school students entitled “Nanotechnology from an ageless material: paper”. The lecture is available on the YouTube channel of the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry (DCCI) since it is part of the cycle DCCI Talks.

At this link, you will find the lecture of Prof. Operamolla (in Italian).

A new work from the NanoLeaves Lab in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, from ENEA – Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development and from the University of Rome La Sapienza, focuses on the use of sustainable CNCs in paper conservation. The proposed approach is benign for the health of restorers, as CNCs are non-toxic and they are dispensed from water.

CNCs are transparent, mechanically and thermally stable, and act as a protective treatment for paper fibers. Furthermore, we demonstrated for the first time their straightforward removal from paper by hydrogel cleaning.

Simple? Yes. The treatment is so promising that we applied it to the pages of a book dated 1738 from a private collection, with remarkable consolidation results.

The research is presently published on ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces as an ASAP paper in open access form.

Enjoy this new stunning research!

Copyrights of this article belong to Alessandra Operamolla. All rights reserved.

During these first months of 2021 I have published two papers concerning my previous research activities started at the University of Bari Aldo Moro.

Among my specializations, I am expert in the synthesis and characterization of conjugated materials based on arylenethienylene structures.

The first of these studies describes the preparation and characterization of diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP) and thiophene -based oligomers, decorated with -SAc groups. This work is the natural evolution of my PhD thesis, that was centered on the preparation of thiol oligoarylenes for molecular electronics. During my PhD studies, the group of Alan Heeger published a paper on Nature Materials describing how aliphatic thiols additives were able to improve the performances of polymeric bulk-heterojunction solar cells. Later on, it was explained that the aliphatic thiol was able to dissolve the fullerene counterpart. This was the period in which I decided to synthesize thiol decorated oligo- and polythiophenes and study their blend forming properties mixing them with PCBM. It took a long time to study these systems, as they were introduced in BHJ solar cells as third components, and understanding the behavior of ternary blends is not easy. Resolutive was my visit at the Imperial College in 2015, in the group of Prof. Natalie Stingelin, were I performed in collaboration with her group differential scanning calorimetry studies on the melting properties of our blends. This was truly helpful to understand the physical chemistry going on there. The result was a paper full of experimental evidences, published in Chemistry of Materials in 2018.

This year, we have published the natural progress of that paper. In the aim of preparing novel additives for BHJ solar cells, we observed that the S-Acyl group decorating DPP-oligomers was able to induce a huge red-shift of absorbed solid-state wavelength, which correspond to enhanced formation of J-aggregates. This behavior is peculiar, and can be replicated also in solid state nanoparticles. The results were interesting and deserved a publication in the journal RSC Advances, as a Gold Open Access paper.

The second paper is pertinent to another class of thiophenearylene – based materials, on which we used the alkoxy substituents to bind enantiomerically pure small biomolecules. More specifically, we are able to decorate the conjugated framework with D-glucopyranose units via beta-glycosides and with tBOC-protected L-phenylalanine via ester bond formation. These materials and their films can be studied by electronic circular dicroism technique (ECD) to get useful insides on the mechanism of their solid-state aggregation. This study is published in the RSC journal New Journal of Chemistry.

Copyrights of this article belong to Alessandra Operamolla. All rights reserved.

The reductive amination reaction is an interesting tool to achieve one terminus functionalization of cellulose nanocrystals. Since at NanoLeaves laboratory we are interested in novel applications of CNCs, we have used pyrene luminescence to understand if the new functionality introduced on CNCs may interact preferentially with some metal cations.

In our work we compare the behavior of reductively aminated CNCs deriving from sulfuric acid hydrolysis or hydrochloric acid hydrolysis (that we named neutral CNC, N_CNC). Pyrene luminescence in water is used as a probe to understand if some selective or preferential interaction with metal cation achieves involving the pyrene portion of the nanocrystals.

With this paper, we demonstrate how we manipulate N_CNC in suspension and how we can achieve selective interaction with cations in water, discarding other chemically or optically interfering phenomena.

This is a fundamental study on the usefulness of the reductive amination reaction performed on nanocellulose. This topic is presently object of research at the NanoLeaves Lab, as usual with the aim of achieving unconventional applications of nanocellulose.

Go to the paper, published in Molecules, 2021

Copyrights of this article belong to Alessandra Operamolla. All rights reserved.

Dr. Mariacecilia Pasini, Prof. Varun Vhora and Prof. Alessandra Operamolla are the Guest Editors of the special Issue entitled “Sustainable Materials and Processes for Organic Electronics” proposed for the journal Sustainability (Publisher MDPI) with deadline October 21st 2021.

The special issue will put chief attention to sustainable materials, processes, energy production and devices linked to the world of thin film organic and non organic electronics. The issue represents a nice opportunity to collect contributions by researchers from all over the world, showing the current trends of the topic.

If you wish to receive more information about the process and the special issue, please contact the Guest Editors at their institutional addresses, visit the website or download the special issue flyer.

A new paper, released in 2021, collects our results on the electrochemical and physico-chemical investigation performed on Langmuir-Shaefer co-deposited films of sulfated cellulose nanocrystals and fulleropyrrolidines (FP). The work is done in collaboration between the University of Pisa, the University of Salento and the University of Trieste, and extends the results and the comprehension on these exciting new hybrid films, previously presented for the first time on the journal Carbon in 2020 by the same group of investigators.

The new paper sheds more light on the nature of the spontaneous interaction between CNCs and FPs, by describing competitive self-assembling experiments in the presence of a solfonated porphirin, the TPPS₄ material. Moreover, anodic photocurrents are explored, pointing at the clear contribution of cellulose to current generation.

Below, the graphical abstract of the new paper. Clicking on the picture, you will be re-addressed to the journal page where you will be able to download our paper free of charge.

Last November 21st 2020, I was invited by the Alumni group of Prof. Sabu Thomas from Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), Kottayam, Kerala, India to participate in a global party to celebrate the brilliant career of Prof. Thomas and his 60th anniversary.

Prof. Sabu Thomas is presently Vice Cancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi University in India and is a researcher whose achievements have had and will have a great impact on the scientific community, especially in the fields of materials and polymers chemistry and of nanotechnology. As one of the most globally cited researchers in the field, Prof. Thomas has also been recently listed among the top 2% scientists by Stanford University, USA.

Prof. Thomas has successfully completed 33 years of research activity in the Mahatma Gandhi University, giving a precious contribution to its successful growth and educating numerous young researchers.

I would like to thank the Alumni group for inviting me in this beautiful virtual meeting and congratulate officially with Prof. Thomas for his remarkable achievements as an investigator and research leader.