Thermal And Frequency Dependance Dielectric Properties Of Conducting Polymer/ Fly Ash Composites

¹Department of Physics, Polymer Nanotech Laboratory, R.T.M. Nagpur University, Nagpur, India

²N. S. Science and Arts College Bhadrawati, Dist. Chandrapur, India

³Department of Physics, Pune University, Pune, India

⁴Department of Physics, Shri Mohata College of Science, Nagpur, India

Adv. Mater. Lett., 2014, 5 (6), pp 360-365

DOI: 10.5185/amlett.2014.amwc.1036

Publication Date (Web): Mar 23, 2014

Copyright © IAAM-VBRI Press

E-mail: sbkondawar@yahoo.co.in

Abstract

With more than 100 million tonnes of fly ash produced in India, use of fly ash for the preparation of polyaniline – fly ash composites will in no way help in its bulk utilization. Still the authors have made an effort towards the better utility of fly ash by synthesizing polyaniline –fly ash composites for electronic devices where the requirement of dielectric materials with good electrical conductivity. There is great challenge to use the waste of thermal power stations in the form of fly ash as reinforcement for the conducting polymers to be good dielectric materials. In this paper, we report the use of fly ash to prepare conducting polymer composite materials. In-situ polymerization of aniline was carried out in the presence of fly ash (FA) to synthesize conducting polyaniline–fly ash composites (PANI-FA) by chemical oxidation method.   The PANI-FA composites have been synthesized with various compositions (10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 wt %) of fly ash in conducting polymer matrix. The surface morphology of these composites was studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). These composites were characterized by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), X-Ray Diffractometry (XRD), Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FTIR) Spectroscopy to investigate surface morphology and structure of the composites. Thermal and frequency dependence dielectric properties of all the synthesized composites have been studied with the help of impedance analyzer. By incorporating fly ash into conducting polymers, dielectric constant of the composites was found to be improved as compared to that of pure conducting polymers. It was also noticed that the dielectric constant of all the composites found to be decreased with increasing frequency but increased with increasing temperature. The results obtained for these composites are of greater scientific and technological interest for good quality capacitors.

Keywords

Conducting polymers, polyaniline, fly-ash, composites, dielectric constant