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THE USE OF BENZOYL PEROXIDE AS AN INITIATOR TO PREPARE PANI AND CNT/PANI FOR THERMOELECTRIC APPLICATIONS

2024    Erden, Fuat; Oner, M. Rasit; Danaci, Ilhan; Ozbay, Salih

Organic thermoelectric (TE) materials combine TE conversion with flexibility, and could facilitate development of self-sustainable wearable electronic devices. In these systems, organic TE materials-based flexible TE generators could generate power from the temperature differences between human body and ambient environment for non-stop operation of self-sustainable wearable electronics without the necessity of external recharging. Among various organic TE materials, polyaniline (PANI) and especially the carbon nanotube (CNT)/PANI composites are receiving special interest for such applications due mainly to the excellent pi-pi stacking between CNTs and PANI that provide simultaneous enhancement of electrical conductivity and Seebeck coefficient. As it is known, chemical oxidative polymerization of aniline in the presence and absence of CNTs is the most common procedure to prepare CNT/PANI and PANI in the TE field, and the most common initiator in aforementioned reaction is ammonium persulfate (APS). However, the structure of APS is actually rather different than PANI. Alternatively, we propose in the present work to use benzoyl peroxide (BPO) as an initiator to prepare PANI and CNT/PANI for TE applications. Because, unlike APS, phenyl rings of BPO might help to realize structural coherency, and hence the resultant samples might exhibit better thermoelectric power factor. To check the validity of this idea, we prepared PANI and CNT/PANI by using BPO as an initiator, and compared their TE properties with the samples that prepared traditionally by using APS as an initiator. For the BPO-synthesized samples, the polymerization reactions were performed by inverted emulsion polymerization since BPO is not soluble in water. The TE properties were determined by Linseis LSR-3/800 Seebeck coefficient and electrical resistance measurement system. Strikingly, we report that BPO-synthesized samples exhibited both higher electrical conductivity and Seebeck coefficient, providing a significant enhancement in power factor as compared to APS-synthesized PANI and CNT/PANI.