Green Chemistry Blog

Scientists in Austria, Romania and Turkey have used the natural resin shellac to devise biocompatible organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), which could help make electronic gadgets biodegradable and allow easier use of OFETs in the body.

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Together with their better known cousins – organic photovoltaics (OPVs) and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) – OFETs are already revolutionising the electronics industry, bringing us flexible displays and light-weight solar-powered chargers. Switching the synthetic substrate material and dielectric layer to the naturally occurring shellac has a number of advantages such as low cost, low toxicity and low environmental impact.

Currently used in the fashion and beauty industry as a hard-wearing nail varnish, shellac has also been used to make gramophone records and as a furniture finish. The material is composed of a mixture of aliphatic and alicyclic hydroxy acids that are easily cross-linked by heating, resulting in a smooth, glassy substrate for the OFET devices to be built upon. It is also easy to process.

Read the full article in Chemistry World

Read the original journal article in Green Chemistry:
Natural resin shellac as a substrate and a dielectric layer for organic field-effect transistors
Mihai Irimia-Vladu, Eric Daniel Głowacki, Günther Schwabegger, Lucia Leonat, Hava Zekiye Akpinar, Helmut Sitter, Siegfried Bauer and Niyazi Serdar Sariciftci
Green Chem., 2013, Advance Article 
DOI: 10.1039/C3GC40388B, Communication

Burning biomass for heat and power could produce as much as 2000 TWh by 2020, which would produce 4–15.6 million tonnes of waste ash, per year, in Europe alone. To address the problem of what to do with all this waste, scientists in the UK have developed a method to convert this ash into mesoporous silica.

Although some of the waste ash produced from the combustion of biomass is currently used in construction, most of it ends up in landfill. Therefore, extracting alkali silicates, which can be used in cement, detergents, catalysts and catalyst supports, is one way of reusing the potentially huge quantities of ash due to be produced in the future.

The team, led by Duncan Maquarrie at the University of York, developed an efficient route for extracting the silicates by forming alkali silicate solutions. The silicate solutions were converted into the porous silica, MCM-41, a useful catalyst and molecular sieve.

Read what Duncan Macquarrie has to say about the research in Chemistry World.

Read the original research published in Green Chemistry:

Alkali silicates and structured mesoporous silicas from biomass power station wastes: the emergence of bio-MCMs, J. R. Dodson,  E. C. Cooper,  A. J. Hunt,  A. Matharu,  J. Cole,  A. Minihan,  J. H. Clark and D. J. Macquarrie, Green Chem., 2013, DOI: 10.1039/C3GC40324F