Electropolymerization studies of PAni/(poly)luminol over platinum electrodes

This work presents a cyclic voltammetry study of the polyaniline/polyluminol copolymer on platinum electrodes. The results show that under determined conditions it is possible to obtain the copolymer deposited on a metallic surface. The luminol presence clearly affects the oxidation of aniline in the nucleation process and, additionally, changes the cyclic voltammetric characteristics of the obtained material. In this aspect, the copolymer presents hybrid characteristics when compared to the polyaniline and polyluminol separately obtained and seems to present intermediary conductivity.

TEM, XRD and AFM study of poly(o-ethoxyaniline) films: new evidence for the formation of conducting islands

The existence of conducting islands in polyaniline films has long been proposed in the literature, which would be consistent with conducting mechanisms based on hopping. Obtaining direct evidence of conducting islands, however, is not straightforward. In this paper, conducting islands were visualized in poly(o-ethoxyaniline) (POEA) films prepared at low pH, using Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and atomic force spectroscopy (AFS). The size of the islands varied between 67 and 470 angstrom for a pH=3.0, with a larger average being obtained with AFS, probably due to the finite size effect of the atomic force microscopy tip. In AFS, the conducting islands were denoted by regions with repulsive forces due to the double-layer forces. On the basis of X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns for POEA in the powder form, we infer that the conducting islands are crystalline, and therefore a POEA film is believed to consist of conducting islands dispersed in an insulating, amorphous matrix. From conductivity measurements we inferred the charge transport to be governed by a typical quasi-one dimensional variable range hopping (VRH) mechanism.