Gold-polymer nanocomposite synthesis

In this chapter, two new approaches for the synthesis of metal-polymer nanocomposite materials have been described. The first method allows the preparation of contact-free dispersions of passivated gold clusters in polystyrene, and it is based on a traditional technique for the colloidal gold synthesis—that is, the alcoholic reduction of tetrachloroauric acid in presence of poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) as polymeric stabilizer. The primary function of the stabilizer is to avoid cluster sintering, but it also allows us to isolate clusters by co-precipitation. It has been found that the obtained polymer-protected nanometric gold particles can be dissolved in alkane-thiol alcoholic solutions to yield thiol-derivatized gold clusters by thiol absorbtion on the metal surface. Differently from other approaches for thioaurite synthesis available in the literature, this method allows complete control over the passivated gold cluster structure since a number of thiol molecules can be equivalently used and the... 

As mentioned earlier in situ approach has also been used for the synthesis of conducting polymer-metal hybrid nanocomposites. Xu et al. [35] have reported the decoration of PPy nanotubes with gold nanoparticles by an in situ reduction process. They prepared PPy nanotubes by MO-FeCl3 self-degrade template method and then reduced HAuCLi within PPy nanotubes in the presence of different surfactants such as sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) and Tween-80. Nanowires of silver PAni nanocomposites have been reported via in situ polymerization method [36]. In this method aniline is oxidized by ammonium persulfate (APS) in the presence of dodecylbenzene sulfonic acid (DBSA) and silver nitrate (AgN03). In another approach gold-PAni core-shell... 

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