Optical, electrical, and structural studies of atmospheric pressure plasma polymerized and iodine-doped nano size polyaniline

Abstract

Polymer materials that combine conductivity with polymeric properties such as flexibility and processability can be used in flexible liquid crystal displays (LCDs), stretchable polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs), polymeric batteries, and antistatic coatings1. Among various polymer materials, polyaniline (PANI) is one of the conductive polymers, which is stable in air and can be easily processed. Recently, the atmospheric pressure plasma jets (APPJs) have been mainly studied for the plasma polymerization and surface modification due to the low temperature and easy process2, 3. However, conventional APPJs have difficulty in realizing the plasma polymerization due to low plasma energy in ambient air conditions, as a result, they would not feed enough energy for activation and recombination to the monomers. Here, we report the use of a novel intense atmospheric pressure plasma jet array to deposit nano size plasma-polymerized aniline (pPANI). The newly proposed atmospheric pressure plasma jet array device can generate the intense plasma and high plasma particle energy in the fragmentation and recombination regions during plasma polymerization process. The pPANI nanoparticles and nanofibers with high molecular weight was successfully obtained by using the proposed intense and high-density atmospheric pressure plasma jet. In addition, the plasma polymerized anilines were doped by iodine in order to introduce charge carriers into the plasma polymerized structures to render them conductive. The detailed novel APPJs method, conductivity, FT-IR, GC-MS, GPC, SEM, TEM images, and more detailed mechanism are studied and will be discussed in detail.