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Study on electrically conducting polymers and their application in optical devices and in sensors

The research plan covers the electrochemical and spectroelectrochemical studies on different conducting polymers having high potential in light-emitting diodes and in sensor applications.Efforts will be made to prepare materials with well known redox behaviour, structure and morphology suitable for the different applications.Using electrochemical synthesis routines the different polymerization parameters as concentration of starting material, solvent, salt, current density, temperature etc. can be efficiently tuned to give certain tailored polymer structures.The polymers in question are poly(paraphenylene), PPP, poly(paraphenylenevinylene), PPV, different poly(3-alkylthiophenes), PAT and poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), PEDOT.Specific goals in this research project are to maximize and combine the properties of different conducting polymers by combining them in bilayer and multilayer structures.In this project different electrochemical techniques will be used to study the electrochemical synthesis and the redox reaction of the polymer electrodes.The techniques applied are cyclic voltammetry, in situ external and internal specular reflection FTIRS, impedance spectroscopy, quartz crystal microbalance measurements, ESR-spectroscopy and UV-VIS spectroscopy.Due to the complicity involved in many of the techniques (special cell set-ups needed and problems involved by combining two techniques for in situ recording the project would gain from combining the skills and expertise in the two groups proposed.

Publication(s)

14.2.1996 / 30.10.1997