Precious metal-free molecular machines for solar thermal energy storage

• Meglena I. Kandinska,
• Snejana M. Kitova,
• Vladimira S. Videva,
• Stanimir S. Stoyanov,
• Stanislava B. Yordanova,
• Stanislav B. Baluschev,
• Silvia E. Angelova and
• Aleksey A. Vasilev

Beilstein J. Org. Chem. 2019, 15, 1096–1106, doi:10.3762/bjoc.15.106

• -crown-5 ether; benzothiazolium crown ether-containing styryl dyes; E/Z photoisomerization; molecular solar thermal system; Introduction Molecular photoswitches permanently attract considerable interest because they hold potential for application in molecular electronic and photonic devices [1][2][3][4

• photoisomerization with lifetimes of the higher energy form longer than 500 seconds. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations at the B3LYP/6-31+G(d,p) level were performed in order to predict the enthalpies (H) of the cis and trans isomers and the storage energies (ΔH) for the systems studied. Keywords: aza-15