Organic conducting polymers electrochemical synthesis

The synthesis of thin films of organic conducting polymers on a nanometer scale is one of the challenges of nanotechnology. Electrochemical poly-... 

Leon Kane-Maguire, Ph.D., is currently a project leader in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science at the University of Wollongong. His research interests are the synthesis of conducting organic polymers and characterizing their stereochemical and photophysical properties. A strong focus of his recent work has been the synthesis of chiral conducting polymers (especially polyanilines) and their use as novel chiral electrodes for electrochemical asymmetric synthesis. 

Template-free techniques have been extensively studied for the fabrication of conducting polymer nanomaterials fabrication. Compared with hard and soft template methods, these methodologies provide a facile and practical route to produce pure, uniform, and high quality nanofibers. Template-free methods encompass various methods such as electrochemical synthesis, chemical polymerization, aqueous/organic interfacial polymerization, radi-olytic synthesis, and dispersion polymerization. 

The electrochemical synthesis of conducting polymer is an electro-organic process rather than an organic electrochemical one, because the emphasis is on electrochemistry and the electrochemical process rather than organic synthesis. 

Within the past decades electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy has become an indispensable technique in electrochemical research. It has proved its effectiveness in establishing many reaction mechanism in electro-organic synthesis. The latest development is the study of charge carrier generation in conducting polymers by simultaneous ESR spectroscopic and electrochemical measurements. The following electrochemical technique can be linked to in-situ ESR studies... 

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