Remarkable thermal stability of BF3-doped polyaniline

TL;DR

BF3-doped polyaniline demonstrates exceptional thermal stability and conductivity retention upon heating, outperforming protonated PANI, as revealed by spectroscopic and diffraction analyses.

Contribution

This study reveals the superior thermal stability of BF3-doped PANI and provides insights into its structural properties using multiple spectroscopic techniques.

Findings

BF3-doped PANI maintains high conductivity after heating.

XPS, FTIR, and XRD analyses explain the stability mechanism.

Compared to protonated PANI, BF3-doped PANI shows over tenfold conductivity improvement.

Abstract

We show that the recently synthesized BF3-doped polyaniline (PANI) exhibits remarkable stability against thermal ageing. Unlike the protonated PANI, which shows rapid degradation of the conductivity on heating in air, BF3-doped PANI shows more than an order of magnitude improvement in conductivity. We employ x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), fourier transform infra-red (FTIR) spectroscopy, and x-ray diffraction (XRD) to understand this unexpected phenomenon.