Credit: Sean Kelley/NIST
One way to visualize strands of PCDTPT, the conductive plastic material researchers studied in this work, is as a collection of gummy worms.
Have you heard of foldable smartphones? How about the flexible television screen that rolls up into a box? Or the ultrathin “wallpaper” TVs that are just millimeters thick?
A future with foldable, bendable, flexible and ultrathin electronics is fast becoming our present. The materials responsible for these consumer goods are typically polymers — plastics — that conduct electricity. To better understand this promising class of substances, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a technique that uses light to quickly and accurately test materials’ conductivity — and potentially reveal behavior that other methods could not. Now, the NIST team has demonstrated the further usefulness of this light-based method by using it to uncover behavior in one polymer that no one had seen before.
The scientists report their results today in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.
The work is NIST’s latest contribution to the quest to develop measurement tools to study novel materials for use in all different kinds of electronic transmission, from bendable biosensors to mobile phones and solar cells.
“There is a growing market for flexible displays and smartphones, and keeping things smaller, more flexible and easier to mass produce,” said Tim Magnanelli, NIST research chemist and National Research Council postdoctoral fellow. “Streamlining the conductivity testing process could be very valuable to industry researchers who just want to know, ‘Are we going in the right direction with a particular modification? Does this make the material better?’”
Plastics That Conduct Electricity
Credit: Sean Kelley/NIST
Built Like a Gummy Worm: Each strand of PCDTPT is made of two pa ..
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