Macromolecular Materials Research
Recently research, led by Dr. Mark Hughes, has focused on the synthesis, properties and applications of composite materials made by coating carbon nanotubes with conducting polymers such as polypyrrole and poly(3-methylthiophene). Carbon nanotubes are long, tubular forms of carbon that have extremely high surface areas and electrical conductivity. Conducting polymers, as their name suggests, are a group of conjugated polymers that exhibit excellent electrical conductivity, in some cases approaching that of copper. Conducting polymers can also be reversibly oxidised and reduced. Carbon nanotubes and conducting polymers are both interesting for their unique electrochemical properties that make them well suited to use in electrochemical capacitors (sources of high power pulses of electrical energy) and actuators (artificial muscles). In the case of carbon nanotube films, it is their high surface area and electrical conductivity that makes them attractive, particularly in terms of their fast response times. In contrast, the redox chemistry of conducting polymers enables them to achieve large charge storage capacities and dimensional changes in response to potential cycling (often several orders of magnitude larger than those of carbon nanotubes), though this benefit comes at the expense of response times. Our work has been aimed at merging the desirable properties of carbon nanotubes with those of conducting polymers in composite films comprising these two materials.
You can find out more about this reasearch and a list of relevant publications at the personal research pages of Dr. Mark Hughes.
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