Conductive Polymer Dispersion

Conducting Polymers, such as Polyaniline, have stimulated the interest of material scientists around the world for their potential game-changing industrial and commercial applications.

For understanding the structure, see above graph and this link. Conducting Polymers are completely insoluble in water and organic solvents because of the extremely high charge density link with the polymeric chain. Also, they are extremely hard to disperse due to their extraordinary high surface tension, by far the highest of all known organic materials, also much higher than water.

Hence, it was important to develop techniques by which they can be processed for various industrial and commercial applications. This involves ensuring adequate dispersion of the conducting polymer for the use in various media.

We have developed a novel Thermoplastic Resin Polyaniline polymer blend which is easy to handle: a Polyaniline Masterbatches.

The masterbatch matrix (a thermoplastic resin) is soluble in solvents like aromatics, ketones, esters, glycol ethers, glycol ether acetates, alcohols etc. allowing to use an ultrafine dispersion of the Polyaniline in various solvents and other media. In this masterbatch, Polyaniline is present in form of nanoscopic particles of around 100 nm size.

This allows for easy incorporation of polyaniline into multiple solvent systems and other polymer compositions. Also, in many applications, along with improved dispersion, the conductivity is also increased.