Two Undergraduate Experiments in Organic Polymers: The Preparation of Polyacetylene and Telechelic Polyacetylene via Ring-Opening Metathesis Polymerization

摘要

Intrinsically conducting polymers (ICPs) have long garneredinterest because of their potential use in a wide variety of applications such as polymer light-emitting diodes, electrostatic dissipation materials, and charge storage devices (1). Organic ICPs were first investigated in the mid 1970s, when the first polymer capable of conducting electricity, polyacetylene, was prepared by Shirakawa and co-workers (2).?The conductivity of doped polyacetylene has since been found to be comparable to the conductivity of the best natural conductor, silver, making it highly sought after for commercialization (3). The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 was awarded to Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid, and Hideki Shirakawa for their discoveries and work in this field (4).