A novel conductive polymer: poly[4-(2-thienyl)benzenamine]

摘要

Amongst the many known structural types of conjugated polymers exhibiting electrical conductivity, polyanilines (PANIs) have always occupied a unique position owing to their reversible and facile proton doping mechanism and excellent redox recyclability, making them useful for applications in electrochromic display devices [1,2], microelectronics [3,4], batteries [5,6] and as electrode materials [7, 8]. In order to overcome the insolubility of the parent polyaniline (in particular in its doped conducting form) which would hamper bulk-scale commercial exploitation, PANIs functionalized by attachment of pendant moieties have been investigated intensively [9-11]. Recently, an alternative approach involving essentially backbone modification by polymerization of 4-aminobiphenyl was reported to afford a polymer (structure I) with structure intermediate between PANI and poly(p-phenylene) and which has enhanced solubility [12-15], Preliminary findings are reported on the analogous poly[4-(2-thienyl)benzenamine] (structure II) which can be viewed as a copolymer with alternating thiophene and aniline repeating units.