Authors: Soumen Jana WeiHong Zhong
Publish Date: 2008/07/01
Volume: 43, Issue: 13, Pages: 4607-4617
Abstract
In this study we investigated the improvement in electrical conductivity of a polymer with the addition of dissolved lithium hexafluorophosphate LiPF6 in an ether based solvent butyl glycidyl ether BGE Thin film samples were fabricated by adding LiPF6 up to 1 wt to poly methylmethacrylate PMMA Film with 075 LiPF6 showed the highest improvement of electrical conductivity by three orders of magnitude Both FTIR spectra and Xray diffraction studies confirmed the formation of BGE–LiPF6 complex Differential Scanning Calorimetry was used to characterize the PMMA/LiPF6 specimens further Dielectric experiments revealed the existence of multiple composition dependent relaxation processes β high frequency and β low frequency relaxation processes The results suggest that electrical conductivity could be improved without influencing the domain polymer and the composite materials including their processability This work suggests that the conductivity of nanocomposites with various solid conductive fillers may be sufficiently enhanced in combination with this ion conduction approach involving a “liquid conductive filler” Since BGE is compatible with epoxy molecules further study is expected to lead to an effective solution to conductive epoxy composites in their wide field of applications including aircraft and multifunctional energy sources such as structural batteriesThe authors are very grateful to Mr Russell G Maguire of the Boeing Company for fruitful discussions on this work The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from NSF through NIRT grant 0506531 This work is also partially supported by NASA through grant NNM04AA62G
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