Highly Conductive Polyfuran-13X Zeolite-Polyaniline Composite

Abstract

During the last few decades, polymer based hybrid organicinorganic composite materials have attracted a considerable research attention all over the world due to their extraordinary properties, which comes out of the synergism of distinctive properties of the components. 1,2 While the incorporation of inorganic silicates (e.g., zeolites) as reinforcing fillers into various polymeric organic matrixes (e.g., elastomers) has been proved to be an efficient way of improving several properties of the resulting composite materials, 1,3 the emergence of organic conducting polymers in the field has opened a novel and very important means to prepare advanced organic-inorganic functional materials. 4,5 Among several � -conjugated conducting polymers (CPs), polyacetylene (PA), polyaniline (PANI), polypyrrole (PPY), and polythiophene (PTP) based composite materials have received a great deal of interest due to their high electrical conductivity and chemical and environmental stability. 1,5–11 Significantly, CPs-based materials are being used these days as ‘plastic electronics’ 11–14 (light emitting diodes (LEDs), photovoltaics, field-effect transistors (FETs)) and ‘smart fluids’ 15,16 (usually called electrorheological fluids (ERFs) which are suspensions of polarizable particles dispersed in an insulating matrix). However, owing to difficulty in synthesizing a regular � conjugated structure with high conductivity, polyfuran (PF) has attracted relatively less attention. It is reported that PF exhibits some distinctive properties such as electrochromic effect and good redox ability. 17 Moreover the resource of furan (F) is much greater and thus F is much less expensive than its N and S analogues pyrrole (PY) and thiophene (TP) respectively. These characteristics should attract the attention of more scientists in chemistry and materials science. In the past decades, the electrochemical synthesis and properties of PF, co-PF-PPY, coPF-PTP biopolymer films have been studied. 18–20 But it is observed that due to high oxidation potential of F, a significant cleavage of the ring generally occurred during the electropolymerization, hence, strongly breaking the expected � conjugated structure. The polymer obtained is dielectric or very low electrically conductive and the yield of the PF formed was greatly restricted by the area of the electrode used. Therefore, a chemical oxidative polymerization (COP) is needed. Recently Li et al. 21 developed a combinatorial approach to synthesize PF and co-PF-PANI composite via COP with variable electrical