Nanotubes soft template preparation

Conductive polymeric nanostructures can be prepared by using hard or soft templates or with template-free methods. The template method has been extensively used because of its simplicity, versatility and controllability. Some further features on this topic are reported in Section 1.3. A typical hard template material can be a thin porous film of aluminum oxide or polycarbonate and polymeric materials ean be deposited into the pores to form nanotubes or nanowires. The electrochemical template method enables a better control of the dimensions compared with the chemical methods. In addition, the nanostructures produced by the electrochemical method are in solid contact with a base electrode that is beneficial for further processing steps when building an electrochemical device. 

In addition to spherical particle nanocomposites, the preparation of nanotubes and nanowires composites with both magnetic and electrical properties is of great interest due to the enhancement of the conductivity. In general, the room temperature conductivity increases when the diameter decreases [79]. Conducting polymer nanotubes can be chemically or electrochemically synthesized by hard and soft template or template-free method in the presence of magnetic nanoparticles [8, 23, 27]. 

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