A general introduction about the Cu(I)-Catalysed Azide-Alkynes Click (CuAAC) chemistry and
literature studies on various applications of CuAAC for different materials, the
importance of the carbon nanomaterials and cellulose materials has been comprehensively
discussed .
The book has mainly focused on evaluating the potential of Cu(I)-catalysed azide-alkynes
click reaction on various surfaces such as, fullerene, single walled carbon nanotubes and
bacterial cellulose to obtain new class of attractive functional materials for the application
of superhydrophobic/hydrophobic characteristics and photocatalytic degradation of different dye molecules.
"Click chemistry" is a powerful concept that was coined by K. B. Sharpless in 2001,
which covers wide range of reactions with great application potentials in different
research areas in material sciences, biological sciences and polymer
chemistry. Initially, the click concept was applied to Huisgen 1,3
-dipolar cycloaddition between an azide and terminal alkynes to form, 1, 2, 3-triazole8 . The original Huisgen dipolar cycloaddition reaction provides the
mixture of triazole product (1,4 and 1,5-regiomers), which were difficult to separate
out by chromatographic methods and long reaction time and high temperature is often
required.
In 2001, Sharpless and co-workers reported that copper salts were able to accelerate this
reaction by 10 million times with many advantages; which they named as click
reaction. Later the concept was extended to many other similar types of reactions like Diels
Alder, Thiol-ene addition, Staudinger ligation, Oxime ligation and Pyridyl disulfide
reactions etc., which are fast and efficient, thermodynamically favoured, regiospecific, simple
to perform, easy to purify and does not generate
offensive bi products.
However, the CuAAC reaction is the most efficient and robust method which fulfils all of the
criteria of click chemistry perfectly, is extremely reliable and easy to perform on different
surfaces. In this case, azide and alkyne building blocks rapidly react with each other in
the presence of Cu(I) to produce 1, 2, 3-triazole ring, which makes it possible to strongly connect
two substrates. It does not require high temperature
and can be performed in a variety of polar and non polar solvents.
