Browsing by Author "Zhigerbayeva, Guldana"

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    FABRICATION OF 2D AND 3D CONDUCTING POLYMERS AND THEIR NANOCOMPOSITES
    (Nazarbayev University School of Engineering and Digital Sciences, 2024-08-28) Zhigerbayeva, Guldana
    The Industrial Revolution and the rapid development of advanced materials manufacturing plastic and polymers made the materials of the 21st century. Modern research societies are interested in natural and synthetic polymers due to their adaptability to our daily needs, chemical, mechanical, and optical properties, good processability, and relatively economically efficient production. The main advantage of polymers over metals and ceramics is their unique and flexible composition, which can be shaped into advanced and more complicated structures. Other advantages include the weight difference, less energy consumption during processing, corrosion resistance, the ability to blend with other polymers easily, and most importantly, the possibility of application in smart materials by constantly replacing the metals with conductive polymers. Before the discovery of conductive polymers, the previous conventional application of polymers was mainly non-electronic due to their inherent insulating properties and mechanical stiffness. Conducting polymers (CPs) attracts researchers due to their ability to combine the electrical properties of metals with the original mechanical and physicochemical properties of traditional polymers. The applicability of conducting polymers is influenced by their processing characteristics, doping level, redox properties, polymer structure, and whether charge transport is purely electronic or mixed ionic and electronic. The size and structure of the conducting polymers (CPs) can vary from atomic configuration to microarchitecture. Nanomaterials can be made up of single atoms, atomic clusters, nanowires, atomically thin layers, hierarchical designs, and two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) macrostructures. These diverse forms are crucial for structural design in all aspects. New techniques were created to make 2D and 3D intrinsic structures of different nanomaterials that can be changed to fit different designs through self-assembly or heterostructure synthesis. Depending on the desired application, these techniques can adjust 2D or 3D nanomaterials for better device performance. Phase control, defect formation, doping, and innovative concepts based on the unique structural properties of 2D, and 3D nanomaterials hold significant potential but remain largely unexplored. Conventional methods for fabricating two-dimensional and three-dimensional conducting polymers require many additional endeavors, such as combining several techniques, selecting specific templates, and using highly costly equipment. In this thesis, we introduced a universal strategic synthetic approach that can easily fabricate various morphological structures of conducting polymers in a one-step step, including nanopowders, nanorods, 2D nanosheets, and 3D bulk materials. Moreover, bicontinuous microemulsion (BME) is a unique interlayered platform that fabricates a continuously porous conducting polymer network. The synthesized materials exhibit an essential increase in performance over traditional template-assisted polymers due to open-cell porosity, which allows better charge transport and adsorption-desorption through the polymer matrix. During this study, four different composite materials were synthesized with polypyrrole using BME and explored their potential applications, such as sensors for heavy metal ions detection, antibacterial coating and working electrode for BES, flexible micro-supercapacitor, flexible ultra-sensitive hydrogen gas sensors working at room temperature. The great performance demonstrated by fabricated devices proved that the developed platform can be used to synthesize unique multifunctional materials with tailoring properties.