Application of Conducting Polymers (Polyanilines) in Sustainable and Renewable Energies and Electronic Systems

Organic materials are most often insulating and only rarely discussed in the connection withmetallic behavior. Nevertheless, one class of organic materials have turned out to possessconductivities that match those of the best crystalline metals like copper. This class of material,the conjugated polymers, has for that reason been coined ‘synthetic metals’. Although theinitial interest in those materials was related to the metal-like conductivity, the current researchesfocus more on exploiting the semiconducting properties of the conjugated polymers.Materials in which electrons are the charge transfer elements are intrinsically conducting polymers,where the electrical conductivity is a result of delocalized electrons along the polymerbackbone. Today’s conductive polymer workhorses are primarily derivatives of polypyrrole,PEDOT, polyaniline, and polythiophene. Polyaniline is considered as a prototype and amongmost popular conductive polymers. Already in 2000 Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid, andHideki Shirakawa were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery and developmentof conductive polymers . Nanotechnology and conductive polymers approximatelyhave the same age, but contrary to the field of conductive polymers, which was abruptly introducedin a short communication, nanotechnology emerged gradually through the journeyfrom microtechnology to smaller scales. Now structural entanglement at the nanoscale hasprovided rare opportunities for the formation of interesting nanocomposites. This lecture coversthe remarkable range of applications emerging for nanostructured conductive polymers.These applications generally exploit the increased surface area of nanostructured materials,often to do something very new. One very important example is of polymer solar cells, wherenanoscale phase separation lies at the heart of charge generation and extraction. Another excitingapplication domain is the use of nanostructured conductive polymers as biomaterials,including the development of neural interfaces. Other applications are sensors, actuators, corrosionprotection, light-emitting diodes (LED), electrocatalysis and so on. It is our hope thatthe listeners will find inspiration and profit from looking into this lecture dedicated to the importantand valuable conducting polymeric materials.