Summary
Polyaniline (PANI) is a conducting polymer of great interest for electronic, magnetic, biomedical and optical applications, and electrospinning is an attractive way to turn it into nanofibres with diameters from about 10 nm to 10 µm. The difficulty is that PANI dissolves poorly in common solvents, so it is usually spun by adding a second, insulating polymer to raise the solution viscosity — which unfortunately lowers the conductivity of the resulting fibres. In this study the authors compare PANI obtained from different raw sources and work towards highly pure electrospun PANI fibres. The polymer powders were characterised by FT-IR, UV-Vis and X-ray diffraction, while the spun fibres were examined by electron microscopy and impedance spectroscopy to assess morphology and electrical conductivity.