Preparation and measurements of electrical and spectroscopic properties of praseodymium (III) chloride-doped polyaniline

Polyaniline (PANI) has been synthesized and doped with praseodymium (III) chloride (PrCl3). The DC conductivity has been measured by varying the amount of dopant in PANI in the temperature range 300–400 K. The conductivity results show that the conductivity is through the hopping process due to the wide range of localized states present near the Fermi level. The parameters derived from conductivity such as pre-exponential (σ0) factor and activation energy (ΔE) have been calculated to evaluate the effect of dopant. FTIR and photoluminescence studies were carried out to study the structural changes of the doped samples, which explore the information related to the suitability of dopant (PrCl3) in the chemical doping process.