Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proposed research program focuses on the development of new basic knowledge in the area of chemically modified surfaces. It will significantly expand our current efforts on modification of surfaces by developing new approaches based on the oxidation and reduction of aromatic and aliphatic organic molecules. With these complementary modification procedures, we will have access to additional sets of modified surfaces having aromatic and aliphatic grafted groups and concomitant different properties and will open the way to several new potential applications. These applications could be in such diverse areas as in biosensors, biomaterials, chemical sensors, molecular electronics, electrocatalysis, corrosion protection and energy conversion and storage (eg. fuel cells, solar cells, batteries and electrochemical capacitors) systems. The long-term objectives of the research program consist in the development of new functionalized surfaces by electrochemical and chemical methods by using various precursors and approaches The specific objectives of the research program are to investigate the: i- grafting by oxidation from aromatic and aliphatic amines, reduction of aliphatic halides, alkyl and aromatic diazonium and modification by dual binding with appropriate precursors; ii- the structure, bonding and properties of the resulting grafted layers and iii- proof-of-concept demonstration of potential applications of these new materials.