Synthesis and Characterization of Polyaniline/Gold Nanocomposites

Conductive polymers are a new class of materials, which exhibit highly reversible redox behavior and unusual combination of properties of metals and plastics. The conductivity of a polymer can be increased several-fold by doping it with a suitable dopant. Doping plays a very important role to convert the polymer into conductive form. In this work an attempt has been made to synthesize polyaniline chemically with various types of dopant acids such as inorganic acids like sulphuric acid , organic acids like p-Toluenesulfonic acid, Camphorsulfonic acid and metal Lewis acids like Auric acid which act as an oxidative agent as well as a secondary dopant to result in a Polyaniline/Gold nanocomposite. Polyaniline (PANI) was chemically synthesized by oxidative polymerization of aniline in different acid dopants. The influence of concentration of dopant acids during polymerization of aniline was studied. The level of doping and nature of the polymer formed was studied using UV-Visible Spectroscopy. FTIR spectra show that the incorporation of Au seems to be effective for better conductivity of the polymer samples. XRD study confirms the presence of Au in the polymer sample in nanometer scale.