3D polyaniline nanoflowers self-assembled from single crystal nanoplates

Abstract

3D semiconductor crystals are ideal to manipulate electronic devices. Therefore, how to prepare 3D semiconductor crystals is interesting. Here, we firstly report a facile and general route to 3D PANI nanoflowers self-assembed by nanoplates. A set of doping control experiments are carried out to find out the key factor in determining conductivity. At proper doping level of CSA, XRD patterns indicate PANI-CSA nanoplates crystallized well. HRTEM images further indicate these nanoplates are single crystals, which self assemble into nanoflowers. Interestingly, these nanoflowers have the highest conductivity due to the highest crystallinity and proper doping level. Thus, it can be concluded that crystallinity and doping level are two important factors influencing the conductivity. The novel method will be readily scalable to produce bulk quantities of PANI single crystals.

Different morphologies of polyaniline nanostructures synthesized by interfacial polymerization

“…Fig. 1b (PAni 2) shows the formation of nanosheets, as observed by Shendkar et al [9] and Tao et al [15,16]; the longer polymerization time (24 h) contributed to the formation of this morphology. In Fig.…”

“…In recent years, several morphologies of PAni nanostructures have been reported, including nanofibers [5,6,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14], nanosheets [9,15,16], and nanoflowers [7,15,[17][18][19][20][21]. These nanostructures have been widely studied because of their promising application in nanomaterials and nanodevices [5,9,15]. Some of these morphologies, in general, have high crystallinity and consequently higher conductivity, which may further increase their application potential.…”

Single Crystal Organic Nanoflowers

“…Carbon, elemental metals and compounds of metals with fifth and sixth group elements were the principal constituents of such assemblies. Single crystal organic nanoflowers have not been discovered so far to the best of our knowledge, though, single crystal inorganic nanoflowers 4 assemblies of organic nanoflowers 5 , 6 , hybrid organic-inorganic nanoflowers using copper (II) ions 2 , 7 diphenylalanine 8 , N,N′-diphenyl-N,N′-bis(1-naphthyl)-1,1′-biphenyl-4,4′-diamine (NPB) 9 and DNA based nanoflowers have been reported recently 10 – 12 .…”

Transmission Electron Microscopy Methodology to Analyze Polymer Structure with Submolecular Resolution

“…Direct TEM imaging of polymer crystals with atomic resolution would be highly desirable, as it can address polymer crystallinity at nanoscale, in contrast to X-ray diffraction techniques. Recently, conductive polymers , have been investigated with scanning nanobeam electron diffraction (NBED), a 4D STEM technique, to map micro- and nanoscale crystalline domains. Aberration-corrected TEM and single-particle analysis methods have been recently employed to investigate polymer structure with high resolution. , However, HRTEM of polymeric materials, allowing straightforward contrast interpretation by direct real-space imaging, remains challenging.…”