Studies on nanomaterials based polymer composites

Abstract

Conducting polymer composites are the future materials for emerging technologies as they possess a combination of unique properties of their constituents. The properties become more interesting when one of the components is in the nanorange. Due to the synergistic effect of the polymer and the nanofiller, the resulting materials are expected to display desirable properties with enhanced performance. One of the most promising nanocomposites systems would be the hybrids based on organic polymer such as polyaniline and nanoparticles such as TiO2, carbon nanotubes and graphene. These nanostructured particles combined with polyaniline can give rise a variety of polymer nanocomposites of interesting properties such as physical, chemical, electrical, electrochemical and so on and thus may become the potential materials for newer and novel applications. Sufficient literature review has been done on the important aspects of these materials to get the idea of the work done in this field and to formulate the plan of work for this thesis. In chapter three: Electrically conductive p-toluenesulfonic acid (pTSA) doped polyaniline (Pani): titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanocomposites (pTSA/Pani:TiO2) was prepared by in-situ oxidative polymerization of aniline in the presence of different amounts of TiO2 nanoparticles. The formation of pTSA/Pani:TiO2 nanocomposites was characterized by Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy (FTIR), x ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The vapor sensitivity of the nanocomposites towards low concentrations of aqueous ammonia was examined and compared with that of the pure polyaniline. It is found that the resistivity of pTSA doped nanocomposites increase on exposure to aqueous ammonia at room temperature. The nanocomposites were found to possess superior ammonia sensing capacity compared to pure polyaniline and it showed linear relationship between the responses and the ammonia concentration.