Improving conductivity of pedot-pss and pedot-spi by addition of surfactant and using the novel synthesized multi-sulfonated diamine as a new template for electronic application

Abstract

PEDOT-based conductive polymers are electrically conductive polymers that have attracted much attention recently as novel functional materials in many applications, especially in areas electronic devices. The preparation of nanosized particles of PEDOT-based conductive polymers could present advantages for the improvement of the electrical and thermal properties. However, up to date, no reports about the impacts of agitation effect at different stirring speeds including addition of surfactant on the template polymerization of PEDOT-based conducting polymer. Therefore, we had paid attention of study for agitated template polymerization with various amounts of surfactants under different stirring speeds. In addition, the novel template, multi-sulfonated polyimide had been studied in this research. The experiment consisted of 3 parts. The first part involved experimental observation on the mixing systems and ways to significantly enhance the conductivity of PEDOT-sulfonatedpoly(imide)s aqueous dispersion. By varying the mixing system (magnetic stirring at 1000 rpm, mechanical at 1000 rpm and mechanical at 4000 rpm), we observed significant conductivity and thermal stability enhancement of the obtained PEDOT-SPI films by using designed stir shaft with high-speed mechanical mixing systems allowing for smaller particle sizes of PEDOT:SPI about 43 nm averaging.The maximum conductivity of 2.04 was observed for using the 4000-rpm mechanical mixing system, which were higher than those of magnetic and 1000 rpm-mechanical mixing systems by factor of 346 and 3.1. The highest conductivity, 9.5 S/cm, was achieved at 1 wt% SDS, which increased by a factor of 5 from the PEDOT-SPI without addition of SDS. We had further improved the conductivity, thermal stability and morphology of PEDOT-based conductive polymers by addition of anionic surfactant during template polymerization in the second part.