Prospects for Nanostructured Conducting-Polymer Actuators

Electroactive Conducting Polymers for the Protection of Metals against Corrosion from Micro- to Nanostructured Films 

Laboratoire Interfaces Traitements et Dynamique des Systemes (ITODYS), CNRS - Universite Denis Diderot Paris, France 

The first conducting polymers (named ICPs for intrinsically conducting polymers, or ECPs for electroactive conducting polymers) were discovered in the seventies by McDiarmid, Heeger, and Shirakawa [1] who showed that unsaturated conjugated polymers (polyacetylene, polyphenylene) became conductive when doped, corresponding to the chemical oxidation of the ethylene or polyphenyl carbon chain. 

The electropolymerization technique, applied to oxidizable monomers (phenols and their derivatives) and developed in the seventies to obtain homogeneous thin dielectric fdms [2], was extended to heterocyclic conducting polymers as early as 1979 with polypyrrole (PPy) [3], and some time later to poly aniline (PANI, 1981) [4,5] and poly thiophene (PT, 1982) [6]. It was shown that adherent homogeneous conductive sohd 

Nanostructured Conductive Polymers Edited by Ali Efteldiari 2010 John Wiley Sons, Ltd 

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