Soft templates electrochemical polymerization

To obtain nanocontainers, Wei et al. employed micelles as soft templates to assist the polymerization [83]. Hollow conical nanostructures are produced by a slow polymerization process (Figure 11.8). Microcontainers could be produced in the open or closed state by changing the polymerization time. However, as far as we are aware, most of the reported actuators were based on bulk materials or synergistic properties of nanostmcture bundles instead of single nanostmcture. Wei et al. realized the manipulation of separated nanocontainers by an electrochemical approach to control of the state of the nanocontainer in situ . Studying the switching of single nanostmctured CPs will open potential... 

Soft-template technique offers advantage of scalability [39]. In hard-template method, a porous membrane of inorganic or polymeric material serves as a rigid mold for chemical or electrochemical replication of stracture. This method provides an easy marmer for production of 1-D nanostractures, but with difficulties of scale up. Hard templates such as silica or carbon spheres are also ideal for synthesis of hollow strac-tures (11 Chen et al. 2003). Classical examples where the template enables the control of morphology of a-Fe Oj nanoparticles can be found in literature (Table 1). 

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. 

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. 

---