| Conductive polymers (CP) are gaining interest day by day due to their growing fields of sophisticated uses. Conventional polymers are generally known to be insulators with their limited use as electrical insulators in any device making purpose. But these have high degree of mechanical strength and mold procesability to facilitate them constructing desirable materials. CPs on the other hand can attain near metallic electrical conductivity at their highest doped state. So they can be thought as good replacement for metals in many aspects. But the problem is not so simple, as the CPs at highest doped state are not at all processable, have very low mechanical strength and mostly not stable also. CPs have characteristic feature of tunable electrical and optical properties, which make them suitable for various device applications. In fact, retaining the electrical and optical properties, If some strength and processability property can be incorporated, CPs can play havoc. That is no wonder why CPs demand in US is rising by 5.8 percent annually.;Polyaniline (PANI) and polypyrrole (PPY) are particularly attractive materials amongst CPs due to their excellent environmental stability along with other features such as, low cost, high conductivity upon doping, and ease of synthesis. In spite of all these advantages, their device applications are limited due to their unprocessable nature. These can neither be solution processable (as they are not soluble in any solvent) nor melt processable (as they decompose before reaching a softening or melting temperature). There are various methods to overcome these problems, one of them, which has been adopted by us is to blend the CPs with some conventional polymers, like polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), poly-methyl-methacrylate (PMMA) etc. The resulting blend will obviously have improved mechanical property of the latter and electrical conductivity of the former. However it is seen that in this process one has to sacrifice some electrical conductivity. Basically, one has to tactfully compromise between the two factors to attain some meaningful applications. Lately, the rapidly expanding field of nano CP composites is generating many exciting new materials with novel properties. It is therefore of immense significance to explore nanostructures of these CP composites' performance in these already established areas. |
