Detection of alkanolamines in liquid cement grinding aids by HPLC coupled with evaporative light scattering detector.

Triethanolamine (TEA), triisopropanolamine (TIPA), diethanol isopropanolamine (DEIPA) are necessary cement additives, and knowing their contents is needed for quality control and also to understand final properties of the cement. Whether it is the production of grinding aids, technical research and development or application research all involve the detection of grinding aids. This work developed a simple analytical technique for the simultaneous analysis of these alkanolamines in liquid cement grinding aids using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) combined with evaporative light scattering detection (ELSD). HPLC was conducted by an XBridge C18 column (with dimensions 4.6 × 250 mm and 5 µm particles) using methanol and 0.1% trichloroacetic acid as mobile elution phases. The ELSD sprayer and drift tube temperatures were 60 ºC and 90 ºC, respectively. HPLC-ELSD developed in this work demonstrated 1) high sensitivity with limits of detection for the three analytes are 0.15, 0.54, 1.04 µg/mL; 2) good linearity with correlation coefficients equal to 0.997-0.999 over the tested concentration range; 3) excellent repeatability with intra- and interday coefficient of variation (CV) below 2.71% and 4, satisfactory accuracy with recovery in the 95.5%-100.8% range. This novel method is a powerful, time- and costeffective tool for alkanolamine analyses and quality control.

Copper-mediated domino process for the synthesis of tetraiodinated di(perylene bisimide).

Tetraiodinated di(perylene bisimide) has been prepared from tetrabrominated perylene bisimide by the combination of Ullmann-type coupling, C-H transformation, and halogen-exchange. The crystal structure analysis confirmed that the aromatic core is quite distorted because of the electrostatic repulsion and steric encumbrance of iodine substituents in the bay regions.

Air-stable n-type semiconductor: core-perfluoroalkylated perylene bisimides.

A series of core-perfluoroalkylated perylene bisimides (PBIs) have been efficiently synthesized by copper-mediated perfluoroalkylation of dibrominated PBIs. Their aromatic cores are highly twisted due to the steric encumbrance in the bay regions as revealed by single-crystal X-ray analysis. The organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) incorporating these new n-type semiconductors show remarkable air-stability and good field effect mobility.