The following papers are describing the results of a many years and fruitful cooperation between 2 research groups located on opposite places of the earth: the one around Alan Kaiser in New Zealand (Victoria University of Wilmington, Physics Department), the other around B. Wessling, basic research group at Zipperling.
It started with Alan's argument: "Bernhard, your thermopower measurements* are not really good to show that your blends do have the same electronic properties as pure PAni does," and didn't believe that blends would be as metallic as pure PAni . Bernhard: "Why don't you measure our blends with your high-tech device?" hoping to convince Alan. And it worked:
J. Polym Sci. Part B 31, 1425 - 1430 (1993)
Synth. Met. 69 (1995), 197 - 200
(submitted to Sol. State Commun., 1995)
The 3 papers are showing results of conductivity and thermopower vs temperature. It is highly interesting and was published by us for the first time, that the conductivity of the blends (with PVC, PETG and PMMA) is greater than that of the pure PAni , at least at lower temperatures, partially (in a new highly conducting PMMA blend) also at and above room temperature.
The latter blend also exhibited metallic temperature/conductivity dependance between 300 and 220 K.
The thermopower of all blends has metallic magnitude and increases when temperature increases (except partially for very low temperatures in the PVC blend) and is linear.
We finally succeeded in elaborating a simple model involving metallic conduction in addition to tunneling between metallic particles which accounts very well for all conductivity data.
* B. Wessling in: "Electronic properties of Conjugated polymers III" (H. Kuzmany et al, eds; Springer 1989), p 447 - 455
