Electrospinning Nanofibers of PANI/PMMA Blends
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Electrospinning Nanofibers of PANI/PMMA Blends Keyur Desai and Changmo Sung Center for Advanced Materials, Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering, One University Avenue, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA 01854, U.S.A. ABSTRACT Electrically conducting organic polymers are a novel class of ‘synthetic metals’ that combine the chemical and mechanical properties of polymers with the electronic properties of metals and semiconductors. Electronically conducting polymers have been studied extensively owing to their applications in energy conversion devices, sensors, electro chromic devices, electromagnetic interference shielding (EMI), electronic circuits etc. Polyaniline - an organic conducting polymer - has been blended with poly methyl methacrylate and the blends have been electrospun to produce conducting nanofibers. The electrospun blends have been characterized to study fiber morphology and formulate conditions for nanofiber formation.
INTRODUCTION Polyaniline is an organic polymer, but is totally unmoldable and insoluble. It is a conducting polymer and exists in three oxidation states [1]. It has varied applications; its first applications were to make conducting coating of plastic materials i.e. printed circuit board production and also corrosion protection. Electrospinning is a process by which sub-micron polymer fibers can be produced using an electrostatically driven jet of polymer solution [2]. The fibers are collected as a non-woven mat or membrane with high surface area to volume ratio. Since, polyaniline is insoluble in most organic solvents it cannot be spun by itself, as for electrospinning a polymer solution is required. Therefore it has to be blended with other polymers to form a polymer solution for spinning. In this study we have blended polyaniline (PANI) with poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA) to form electrospun fibers.
EXPERIMENTAL DETAILS Polyaniline is made conducting by doping with protonating acids like campor sulfonic acid
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(CSA) to make it conducting. Polyaniline of the emeraldine base form (Aldrich M.W. 65,000) was doped with CSA (Aldrich) in ratio of 0.5:0.5 wt % polymer repeating unit [3]. The PANICSA complex thus formed was mixed with desired amount of PMMA (Aldrich M.W. 120,000) in chloroform (Aldrich) solvent. The resulting mixture thus formed was electrospun to form fibers. Solutions were prepared with 2 – 12 wt % PANI-CSA and 5 – 16 wt % PMMA. In electrospinning an electrode connected to a high voltage power supply is inserted into a polymeric solution contained within a pipette as shown in Figure 1. A grounded collection plate is kept at a suitable distance from tip of the pipette to collect the fibers. The formation of fibers depends upon the voltage applied, concentration of polymers in the solution, tip-target distance and flow rate of solution from the pipette [4]. For the first phase of this research we have studied the effect of polymer concentrations and spinning voltage applied on the formation of fibers. The electrospun fibers were characterized
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