Fabian Eisenreich

• Dr.
• Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology

The growing accumulation of plastic waste emphasizes the pressing need for sustainable recycling technologies. In this study, we present a one‐step conversion of bisphenol A based polycarbonate (BPA‐PC) waste into aliphatic polycarbonate (APC) polyols using diols with varying chain lengths. The resulting APC polyols were subsequently utilized as so...

Using photoswitchable molecules to manipulate supramolecular interactions under light illumination has driven advancements in numerous fields, allowing for the strategic alteration of molecular systems. However, integrating the moiety responsible for these interactions into the photochromic scaffold can be complex and may hamper the switching effic...

Organic aerogels are an advanced class of materials renowned for their ultralow thermal conductivity and highly porous architecture, making them ideal for applications in thermal insulation, catalysis, and chemical absorption. However, these polymeric networks pose environmental concerns as their permanently crosslinked scaffold makes recycling bac...

Photocatalysis is a versatile and rapidly developing field with applications spanning artificial photosynthesis, photo-biocatalysis, photoredox catalysis in solution or supramolecular structures, utilization of abundant metals and organocatalysts, sustainable synthesis, and plastic degradation. In this Perspective, we summarize conclusions from an...

Epoxy thermosets are indispensable in various industrial applications due to their exceptional material properties. However, their limited recyclability poses a significant challenge for sustainability. To address this issue, integrating recyclable imine moieties into epoxy systems has emerged as a promising strategy. Despite recent advancements, c...

With rising energy demands and costs, the significance of thermally insulating materials is on a constant upward trajectory. While they offer impressive performance, their sustainability is increasingly becoming an essential design feature. The study thus develops an unprecedented strategy that enables recycling, repairing, and reprogramming of sup...

Spontaneous phase separation is a promising strategy for the development of novel electronic materials, as the resulting well‐defined morphologies generally exhibit enhanced conductivity. Making these structures adaptive to external stimuli is challenging, yet crucial as multistate reconfigurable switching is essential for neuromorphic materials. H...

Chemical recycling offers a promising solution for the end‐of‐life treatment of synthetic polymers. However, the efficient recovery of well‐defined recycled building blocks continues to be a major challenge, especially for crosslinked thermosets. Here, we developed vanillin‐based polymer networks functionalized with dual‐cleavable imine and acetal...

Epoxy thermosets constitute a significant portion of high‐performance plastics, as they possess excellent thermal and mechanical properties that are applicable in a wide range of industries. Nevertheless, traditional epoxy networks show strict limitations regarding chemical recycling due to their covalently crosslinked structures. Although existing...

Having external control over fundamental properties of polymers, such as their physical state, is a crucial yet challenging design criterion for smart materials. Liquifying polymers through photochemical events has significantly advanced various research lines. However, the opposite process of solidifying a polymer that is intrinsically in a liquid...

Shaping a sustainable future is closely tied to the development of advanced plastic recycling technologies. As global recycling rates remain low, the lion's share of post‐consumer plastics is either incinerated or disposed of in landfills. This unbalanced plastic waste management not only poses severe environmental risks, but also entails an irrevo...

Shaping a sustainable future is closely tied to the development of advanced plastic recycling technologies. As global recycling rates remain low, the lion's share of post‐consumer plastics is either incinerated or disposed of in landfills. This unbalanced plastic waste management not only poses severe environmental risks, but also entails an irrevo...

Organic aerogels are an intriguing class of highly porous and ultralight materials which have found widespread applications in thermal insulation, energy storage, and chemical absorption. These fully cross‐linked polymeric networks, however, pose environmental concerns as they are typically made from fossil‐based feedstock and the recycling back to...

Closed‐loop recycling of polymers represents the key technology to convert plastic waste in a sustainable fashion. Efficient chemical recycling and upcycling strategies are thus highly sought‐after to establish a circular plastic economy. Here, we present the selective chemical depolymerization of polycarbonate by employing a vanillin derivative as...

Closed‐loop recycling of polymers represents the key technology to convert plastic waste in a sustainable fashion. Efficient chemical recycling and upcycling strategies are thus highly sought‐after to establish a circular plastic economy. Here, we present the selective chemical depolymerization of polycarbonate by employing a vanillin derivative as...

Photoredox‐catalyzed chemical conversions are predominantly operated in organic media to ensure good compatibility between substrates and catalysts. Yet, when conducted in aqueous media, they are an attractive, mild, and green way to introduce functional groups into organic molecules. We here show that trifluoromethyl groups can be readily installe...

Precise control over the folding pathways of polypeptides using a combination of noncovalent and covalent interactions has evolved into a wide range of functional proteins with a perfectly defined 3D conformation. Inspired hereby, we develop a series of amphiphilic copolymers designed to form compact, stable, and structured single-chain polymeric n...

The field of polymer science has advanced to a point where precise control over a polymer's chain length, dispersity, and microstructure permits to access compartmentalized polymers that catalyze a range of reactions efficiently and selectively in aqueous media. We here summarize how we unveiled the relation between the primary structure of amphiph...

The use of organic photoredox catalysts provides new ways to perform metal-free reactions controlled by light. While these reactions are usually performed in organic media, the application of these catalysts at ambient temperatures in aqueous media is of considerable interest. We here compare the activity of two established organic photoredox catal...

Strong and well-engineered interfaces between dissimilar materials are a hallmark of natural systems but have proven difficult to emulate in synthetic materials, where interfaces often act as points of failure. In this work, curing reactions that are triggered by exposure to different wavelengths of visible light are used to produce multimaterial o...

Materials based on the laminar ordering of self‐assembled molecules have a unique potential for applications requiring efficient energy migration through densely packed chromophores. Here, employing molecular assemblies of coil–rod–coil block molecules for triplet–triplet annihilation upconversion (TTA‐UC) based on triplet energy migration with lin...

Photoredox catalysis has recently emerged as a powerful synthesis tool in organic and polymer chemistry. In contrast to the great achievements realized in organic solvents, performing photocatalytic processes efficiently in aqueous media encounters several challenges. Here, it is presented how amphiphilic single‐chain polymeric nanoparticles (SCPNs...

Multimaterial additive manufacturing is an enabling tool for exploring hard to access structure-property relationships. In this work, a recently developed multimaterial printing approach, solution mask liquid lithography, is used to produce porous polymer-polymer composites inspired by tough, hierarchical structures found in nature. The results dem...

Incorporating molecular photoswitches into various materials provides unique opportunities for controlling their properties and functions with high spatiotemporal resolution using remote optical stimuli. The great and largely still untapped potential of these photoresponsive systems has not yet been fully exploited due to the fundamental challenges...

Adjusting the length, composition, and microstructure of a polymer during the process of its formation in principle allows achieving the desired properties, thereby enabling custom-design of the thus generated polymer for its targeted function. Over the past years, different stimuli have been applied to manipulate responsive catalyst systems in sit...

The transfer of stereoinformation is at the heart of asymmetric reactions. By incorporating the natural monoterpene l‐menthone into the backbone of a diarylethene, we achieved efficient chirality transfer upon photocyclization, resulting in the preferred formation of one major closed isomer in a diastereomeric ratio (d.r.) of 85:15. More significan...

The transfer of stereoinformation is at the heart of asymmetric reactions. By incorporating the natural monoterpene L menthone into the backbone of a diarylethene, we could achieve efficient chirality transfer upon photocyclization resulting in the preferred formation of one major closed isomer in a diastereomeric ratio (dr) of 85:15. More signific...

Bond formation between two molecular entities in a closed system strictly obeys the principle of microscopic reversibility and occurs in favour of the thermodynamically more stable product. Here, we demonstrate how light can bypass this fundamental limitation by driving and controlling the reversible bimolecular reaction between an N-nucleophile an...

The fundamental properties of a polymeric material are ultimately governed by its structure, which mainly relies on monomer composition and connection, topology, chain length, and polydispersity. Thus far, these structural characteristics are typically set ex situ by the specific polymerization procedure, eventually limiting the future design space...

A novel methodology for printing 3D objects with spatially resolved mechanical and chemical properties is reported. Photochromic molecules are used to control polymerization through coherent bleaching fronts, providing large depths of cure and rapid build rates without the need for moving parts. The coupling of these photoswitches with resin mixtur...

A simple, inexpensive, and modular method to directly illuminate NMR samples for in situ analysis of photochemical transformations is reported. The versatility of this technique is demonstrated by analyzing the light-induced propagating front for small-molecule photoswitches and the kinetics of photocontrolled living radical polymerizations. In sit...

Among bistable photochromic molecules diarylethenes (DAEs) possess the distinct feature that upon photoisomerization they undergo a large modulation of their π-electronic system, accompanied by a marked shift of the HOMO/LUMO energies and hence oxidation/reduction potentials. In order to exploit such photoswitchable systems it is important to preci...

Novel aromatic guanidine-based organocatalysts for the ring-opening of l-lactide were synthesized and applied in comprehensive polymerization experiments and kinetic studies. The introduction of electronically active substituents led to a significant change in activity by 2 orders of magnitude. The formed polylactide is featured with narrow polydis...