Studies on aniline and m toluidine copolymers with substituted aniline derivatives and their metal nanocomposites as electrochemically active materials

Abstract

Conducting polymers are the special class of electroactive materials that possess unique electro conductive properties. The most fascinating electroconductive polymers are as follows: polyaniline, polythiophene and polypyrrole and they possess many industrial applications. Among them PANI is the most suitable polymer because of its low cost, ease of synthesis, excellent environmental stability, controllable physical and electrochemical properties such as oxidation and protonation. The main reason for this conducting nature is the delocalization of the polarons and its extended coil conformation. However polyaniline possesses poor industrial processability because of its less soluble characteristics in common organic solvents and that lead difficulties for device fabrication. Hence several efforts have been put forth by the researchers to investigate the processability of the polyaniline based polymer. In order to improve the processability of the polyaniline, copolymerization method has been adopted using new polyaniline derivatives containing functional groups attached to ortho and para positions. The presence of this functional group as side chains not only alters the polar nature but acts as self dopants and thus it improves the solubility of the polymer in different organic solvents. Another way of increasing the processability of this polyaniline polymer is doped with the organic acids such as dodecyl benzene sulfonic acid and camphor sulfonic acid. In this case, the presence of long alkyl chains can increase the solubility of the copolymer without sacrificing the conductivity of the polymer. Our research work involves in the synthesis of the novel copolymers of aniline and m-toluidine with polyaniline derivatives such as 2-bromoaniline, 2-ethyl aniline and 3-aminobenzoic acid. newline