Preparation of the thermally stable conducting polymer PEDOT – Sulfonated poly(imide)

We describe the template polymerization of EDOT with sulfonated poly(amic acid) (SPAA), resulting in a stable conducting polymer aqueous dispersion, PEDOT-SPAA, with particle size ca. 63 nm. In films of PEDOT-SPAA, the sulfonated poly(amic acid) template undergoes imidization within 10 min at temperatures greater than 150 °C, resulting in PEDOT-sulfonated poly(imide) (PEDOT-SPI) with 10-fold conductivity enhancement. This material is highly thermally stable as compared to PEDOT-PSS. Thermal stability is necessary for many processing applications of conducting polymers, including annealing for OPVs and melt-processing of polycarbonate for device encasement. Isothermal TGA experiments were run at 300 °C for PEDOT-PSS and PEDOT-SPAA and we found that PEDOT-SPAA had a smaller slope for degradation. Annealing of films at 300 °C for 10 min caused the conductivity of PEDOT-PSS films to be unmeasurable (<1 × 10−5 S/cm), while those of PEDOT-SPAA increased 6-fold. Secondary doping of the PEDOT-SPAA system with additives commonly used for PEDOT-PSS was also investigated.