Fabrication of Highly Conductive Pedot Nanofibers
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Fabrication of Highly Conductive PEDOT Nanofibers Alexis Laforgue and Lucie Robitaille Industrial Materials Institute – National Research Council Canada 75 de Mortagne Blvd., Boucherville (Québec) Canada J4B 6Y4 ABSTRACT Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) nanofibers were obtained by the combination of electrospinning and vapour-phase polymerization. The fibers had diameters around 350 ± 60 nm, and were soldered at every intersection, ensuring superior dimensional stability of the mats. The nanofiber mats demonstrated very high conductivity (60 ± 10 S/cm, the highest value reported so far for polymer nanofibers) as well as very interesting electrochemical properties, due to the porous and nanostructured nature of the electrospun mats. The mats were incorporated into allsolid flexible supercapacitors that showed interesting performances for applications where flexible and lightweight energy storage devices are required. INTRODUCTION The development of nanofibers represents a research area of great interest due to the variety of potential applications of these structures. Electrospinning is one of the most commonly used techniques to obtain nanofibers because of its versatility and relative simplicity. In the past few years, an increasing number of studies have been dedicated to the fabrication of electrospun nanofibers containing intrinsically conductive polymers (ICPs) such as polyaniline, polypyrrole, polythiophenes or poly(p-phenylene vinylenes)1. Potential applications of such nanofibers include conductive textiles, flexible organic electronics, energy storage and sensors. Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) is one of the most conductive and stable ICPs. In 2004, Winther-Jensen et al. reported the preparation of PEDOT ultrathin films showing conductivities exceeding 103 S/cm using a vapour-phase polymerization process2. However, much lower conductivities, in the order of 10-4 to 1 S/cm, have been reported for electrospun fibers incorporating PEDOT3,4. Conductivities in the order of 10 S/cm were also observed on PEDOT nanofiber webs but the fiber geometry was not preserved and the webs were transformed into a porous film structure upon rinsing procedures5. The authors have previously reported on the fabrication of pure PEDOT nanofibers using a two-step process combining electrospinning and vapour-phase polymerization. The first results led to highly conductive porous materials (200 S/cm) but the fibers partially "melted" in the process6. In this paper, we describe the optimization of this technique. Well defined and highly conductive nanofibers of pure PEDOT have been successfully fabricated. The structure and morphology of the nanofibers were characterized as well as their spectroscopic and electrochemical properties. Finally, flexible all-solid supercapacitors were built using these PEDOT nanofibers and characterized as flexible energy storage materials. EXPERIMENTS PEDOT nanofibers were obtained using a two-steps procedure. First, to a solution of iron tosylate (FeTos) 40wt% (Clevios CB4
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