Flexible Conductive Polymer Membranes

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Unlike most manmade plastics that are insulator to electricity, conductive polymers can conduct electricity owning to their specific chemical structure called conjugation. Upon doping, i.e., addition of charged molecules, the originally localized charges in conjugated polymer chains become mobilized to carry electricity through the material. Examples include polypyrrole, polythiophene and polyaniline. However, it is also because of this conjugated molecular structure conductive polymers are mostly rigid, brittle and non-flexible. The lack of mechanical flexibility has greatly limited their applications in areas such as membrane and energy storage technologies. To overcome this drawback conductive polymers are often composed with other flexible polymers to gain mechanical performance, for example, coated on textiles or on flexible polymer membrane surface. Such coating has to be very thin otherwise it will compromise the mechanical property of the substrate. The coating also easily delaminates and often detaches from the substrate. In literature there has been no report on thick flexible membranes made of unmodified intrinsically conductive polymers.