Applications
Polyaniline and the other conducting polymers such as polythiophene, polypyrrole, and PEDOT/PSS have potential for applications due to their light weight, conductivity, mechanical flexibility and low cost. Polyaniline is especially attractive because it is relatively inexpensive, has three distinct oxidation states with different colors and has an acid/base doping response. This latter property makes polyaniline an attractive for acid/base chemical vapor sensors. The different colors, charges and conformations of the multiple oxidation states also make the material promising for applications such as actuators, supercapacitors and electrochromics. They are suitable for manufacture of electrically conducting yarns, antistatic coatings, electromagnetic shielding, and flexible electrodes.
Attractive fields for current and potential utilization of polyaniline is in antistatics, charge dissipation or electrostatic dispersive (ESD) coatings and blends, electromagnetic interference shielding (EMI), anti-corrosive coatings, hole injection layers, transparent conductors, ITO replacements, actuators, chemical vapor and solution based sensors, electrochromic coatings (for color change windows, mirrors etc.), PEDOT-PSS replacements, toxic metal recovery, catalysis, fuel cells and active electronic components such as for non-volatile memory.
Currently, the major applications are printed circuit board manufacturing (final finishes, used in millions of m² every year), antistatic and ESD coatings, and corrosion protection.
Polyaniline is commercially available from Ormecon which recently merged with Enthone (CooksonElectronics), Eeonyx, Crosslink.
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