Materials Chemistry and Physics, Vol.138, No.1, 319-326, 2013
Polyaniline/Vanadium oxide composites: An effective control in morphology by varying reactant concentrations
A one pot synthesis protocol is presented for the realization of organic/inorganic hybrid nanostructures comprised of polyaniline and vanadium oxide. The polyaniline/vanadium oxide hybrid morphology is tailored by controlling the relative concentration of reactants which resulted in diverse morphologies ranging from nanorods, combined nano/microrods to porous nano/microspheres. Temporal evolution of morphology is investigated to elucidate the formation mechanism in detail. The prepared composites exhibit enhanced thermal stability in comparison to pure polyaniline which may be attributed to the strong chemical combination of vanadium oxide and polyaniline within the composites as prevailed by FTIR and TGA analysis of the products. This simple and controllable approach for synthesizing the organic/inorganic hybrid material should have future applications in energy storage devices, sensors and many more. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords:Composite materials;Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR);X-ray photo-emission spectroscopy (XPS);Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA)