Flexible Conductive Polymer Membranes

与大多数人造塑料的绝缘体不同，导电聚合物可以导电，因为它们具有称为共轭的特殊化学结构。掺杂后，即添加带电分子，共轭聚合物链中原本定位的电荷被动员起来，通过材料携带电。例子包括聚吡咯、聚噻吩和聚苯胺。然而，也正是由于这种共轭分子结构，导电聚合物大多是刚性、脆性和非柔性的。缺乏机械灵活性极大地限制了它们在膜和储能技术等领域的应用。为了克服这一缺点，导电聚合物通常与其他柔性聚合物组成以获得机械性能，例如涂覆在纺织品或柔性聚合物膜表面。这种涂层必须非常薄，否则会损害基材的机械性能。涂层也很容易分层，经常从基材上脱落。在文献中，还没有关于未经改性的本征导电聚合物制成厚柔性膜的报道。

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.