Congratulations to Bea whose work on the use of lyotropic liquid crystals (LLCs) for solar-energy storage has been published in JACS! In this work, we explore the solvent-driven self-assembly of azobenzene photosurfactants (AzoPS) into LLCs for molecular solar thermal energy storage (MOST) applications for the first time. Using a combination of in-situ differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) with small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), we were able to unpick the structure-photoswitch-energy storage relationships in these materials, paving the way for accelerated design of similar, amphiphilic systems for future MOST technologies.

Many thanks to all the collaborators who contributed to the success of this project: Zhihang Wang, Martijn Zwijnenburg, Charlotte Edwards-Gayle, Kasper Moth-Poulsen and Nathan Cowieson.

You can read the paper here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jacs.5c09267