Inorganic dopants in polymer cholesteric liquid crystals

Abstract

<p>A variety of dopants are used for different types of polymers to change their properties. Inorganic dopants are usually used to change the dielectric properties of the polymers. These compositions find different applications especially in electronic systems due to ease of polymer processing, increased functionality and low cost of novel materials that are with relatively high dielectric constant compared to the base polymer material.</p><p>In this study, polymer cholesteric liquid crystal (PCLC) is used as a host material that is doped by different inorganic dopants, BaTiO<sub>3</sub> and TiO<sub>2</sub>, all of them affected the dielectric constant of the polymer matrix. This is important from the fact that doped PCLC can be used for a variety of electro-optical applications, e.g. display applications and low energy consuming e-book application. The behaviour of inorganic dopants in PCLC is calculated by various existing mixing models; the best fit is observed by use of logarithmic equation.</p>

Polymer Composites with Improved Dielectric Properties: A Review

“…N. Guo et al synthesized nanocomposites and observed that rodshaped nanofillers exhibited a higher dielectric con-stant than the nanocomposite prepared using spherical nanofillers [16]. A research study has reported on that needle-shaped TiO 2 fillers increased the dielectric constant more than the spherically shaped TiO 2 fillers, when composed with polymeric cholesteric liquid crystals at a lower volume than spherical ones [42]. Another investigation reported on that, as the filler size was reduced to the nano scale, the dielectric loss increased effectively as nanoparticles exhibited a tendency to agglomerate.…”