Towards a universal organogelator: A general mixing approach to fabricate various organic compounds into organogels

Low-molecular-weight organogels (LMOG) have been attracting a surge interest in fabricating soft materials. Although the finding of the gelator molecules has been developed from serendipity to objective design, the achievement of the gelator molecules still needs good design and tedious organic synthesis. In this paper, we proposed a simple and general mixing approach to get the organogel for nearly all the organic compounds and even soluble nanoparticles without any modification. We have designed a universal gelator molecule, which forms organogels with more than 40 kinds of organic solvents from aploar to polar solvents. More interestingly, when other organic compounds or even nanomaterials, which are soluble in certain organic solvents, are mixed with this gelator molecule, they can form organogels no matter whether the individual compounds could form organogel or not. This method is applicable to nearly all kinds of soluble organic compounds and opens an efficient and universal way to fabricate gel materials.