Studies on biphenyl disulphonic acid doped polyanilines: Synthesis, characterization and electrochemistry

In this article, we report on the results obtained for the efforts we made to bring processability to the conducting polyaniline and substituted polyanilines by designing and synthesizing a new disulphonic acid with a biphenyl moiety as spacer group, viz. 4,4′-biphenyldisulphonic acid (BPSA). When doped, the disulphonic acid acts as a spacer group between the polyaniline chains and facilitates increase in solubility and conductivity. The spacing effect is maximized when BPSA is used as doping agent in in situ polymerization reactions. The conductivity of polyaniline doped by BPSA is 4 S/cm and for the substituted polyanilines it ranged from 2 $ \times $ 10 − 5 to 8 × 10 − 4 S/cm.