Structural, thermal decomposition and luminescent studies on gel grown crystals of poly[tetraaquadinicotinatostrontium(II)] containing ‘χ’-shaped hydrophobic channels

single crystals of the polymeric title complex tetraaquadinicotinatostrontium (spyc) were successfully grown by a simple and efficient method—the gel encapsulation technique. sodium metasilicate was used as the gel medium for this purpose. the crystal structure of the complex indicates that it belongs to triclinic system with space group (poverline{1}). the packing diagram of the complex shows uniformly arranged ‘χ’-shaped hydrophobic channels. the thermal decomposition of the crystals have been studied by thermogravimetric analysis at four different heating rates and kinetic parameters including apparent activation energy (ea), and pre-exponential factor (log a) were calculated by kissinger, ozawa and flynn–wall–ozawa methods. analytical techniques including ft-ir, chn, powder and single-crystal x-ray diffraction were also carried out to characterize the grown crystals. the solid-state luminescent properties of free ligand and complex were also investigated at room temperature.