Soft-template synthesis of conducting polymer hollow-nano-spheres

POLY 223

I-Wei Chu, iwei@mail.csi.cuny.edu, Kai Su, Su_K@mail.csi.cuny.edu, and Nan-Loh Yang, Nan_loh_yang@yahoo.com. Department of Chemistry, Center for Engineered Polymeric Materials, College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York, 2800 Victory Blvd, College of Staten Island, Department of Chemistry, 6S-216, Staten Island, NY 10314
Conducting polymers on the nanometer scale have widespread applications such as electronic devices, mechanical actuators, and chemical sensors.1-3 Recently, controlled releases by using conducting polymers as novel vesicles have attracted attentions due to their unique property of substantial volume changes with the variation of doping level.4 Hollow conducting polymer nanostructures have promises for loading contents of interest, although relatively poor mechanical properties and limited solubility of conducting polymers lead to difficulties in the fabrication of such structures. Previous studies focused on template syntheses of conducting polymer hollow nanostructures.5-10 Most of these techniques, however, need a template removal process to obtain the final products. We report here a soft-template synthesis of conducting polymer nano-hollow-spheres for controlled releases. These hollow spheres were readily prepared by using an interfacial polymerization approach under mild reaction conditions. The concentration of 3, 4-ethylenedioxythiophene (EDOT) monomer plays a significant role in controlling the morphology of intact hollow PEDOT nanospheres.