Polythiophene/SIS/rGO based ternary composite blends and their applications

Abstract

Conducting polymers such as polythiophene have been gaining interest in The recent era due to their remarkable properties such as cost efficiency, biocompatibility, and environmental stability. On the other hand, it also lack thermal stability and film making properties which limits its use on large scale. To overcome these demerits of conducting polymers different modifications are being made in their structure to utilize them for useful purposes. In recent work,Polythiophene was prepared by chemical oxidation method using thiophene monomer and FeCl3 as an oxidizing agent. Similarly, rGO Nano composites were also synthesized. Binary blends PTh/SIS(5w/w%,7w/w%),and ternary blends rGO/PTh/SIS having 10mg,20mg and 30mg Nano filler composition were prepared using solvent casting method. Their characterization was performed by FTIR,XRD,SEM and UV visible spectroscopy.FTIR of polythiophene gave characteristic peaks at 1020cm-1, 1544cm-1,3100cm-1,1440cm-1and780cm-1.SEM images confirmed highly porous nanofiber structure of polythiophene. The XRD pattern of polythiophene showed a wide diffraction peak at 2 theta value of 20.8 Indexed as (001) plane and XRD spectrum of rGO shows a broad peak at 25 of 2 theta values indexed at (002)plane.UV visible spectroscopy showed that by incorporating rGO band gap of films was decreased up to 4.59eV.Mechanical and dielectric properties of PTh/SIS and rGO/PTh/SIS film blends were also studied. Results of mechanical properties have shown that by increasing the polythiophene concentration up to 7w/w% in SIS/PTh films the tensile strength was also increased. Similarly by incorporating rGO Nano filler and increasing its concentration up to 30mg the tensile strength of films were further increased. Dielectric results of PTh/SIS and rGO/PTh/SIS films have shown that dielectric constant value was increased up to 45 with the loading of 30mg of reduced graphene oxide.