Chemie douce

Soft Chemistry Routes to New Materials—Chemie Douce, ed. J. Rouxel, M. Toumoux and R. Brec, Trans. Tech. Publications, Aedermannsdorf, Switzerland, 1994. 

As indicated by Equation (1), intercalation reactions are usually reversible, and they may also be characterized as topochemical processes, since the structural integrity of the host lattice is formally conserved in the course of the forward and reverse reactions. Typically, these reactions occur near room temperature, but this is in sharp contrast with most conventional solid-state synthetic procedures which often require temperatures in excess of 600 °C, the term Chemie Douce has been coined to describe this type of low-temperature reaction. Remarkably, a wide range of host lattices has been found to undergo these low-temperature reactions, including framework (3D), layer (2D), and linear chain (ID) lattices. 

This technique is based in the chemistry of chemie douce which provides efficient and versatile routes for synthesizing highly homogeneous, cost-effective nanomaterials... 

Because of the possibility of applying Mdssbauer spectroscopy the solid-state chemistry of the Fe- substituted material is best understood [69, 72, 77J. Mossbauer spectroscopy confirms that the Fe in the pyroaurite type material is Fe(III). Glemser and co-workers have found that electrochemical oxidation of the material converts about 30% of the Fe(III) to Fe(IV) [69, 72]. The results were consistent with a high-spin configuration with the Fe(IV) in FeOj octahedra with O, symmetry. The O, symmetry can only occur if the surrounding NiO j octahedra also have an symmetry. Hence the Fe(IV) ions in the layer must be surrounded by six NiO octahedra with the Ni in the Ni(IV) state. Delmas and coworkers found evidence for Fe(IV) in both high- and low-spin states for oxidized materials prepared by the chemie douce ... 

The "chemie douce" approach, although extremely elegant, is limited by the availability of suitable precursor solids. Our research goal has been to develop a general, low temperature, controlled approach to preparing solids. 

Dobbs, W., Suisse, J.-M., Douce, L. and Welter, R. (2006) Electrodeposition of Silver Partides and Gold Nanopartides from Ionic Liquid-Crystal Precursors. Angewandte Chemie (International Edition in English), 45, 4179-4182. 

W. Dobbs, J. M. Suisse, L. Douce, R. Welter, Angewandte Chemie-Intemational Edition... 

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