Dr. Bernhard Wessling
Ormecon Chemie
(a subsidiary of Zipperling Kessler & Co.)
http://www.ormecon.de/
Ahrensburg
Germany
To the memory of Prof. Eugène Geniès,
who was always very interested in processing
and applications of polyaniline. I will not forget
our exciting discussions, our cooperation and his funny humor.
Practical applications of intrinsically conductive polymers (ICP) like Polyaniline (PAni) have been thought of since the very beginning of the research in this field. But what originally had begun with a kind of euphoria reaching even daily newspapers all over the world, has gone through a deep valley of disappointments since 1989.
The strongest motivation for the previously broad support of basic and applied research by the industry and by public funding was the hope for developing “polymeric” accumulators and batteries using ICPs. As this hope vanished (due to the - at best - only equivalent charge storage capacity compared to conventional inorganic systems), most bigger companies stopped their work. Earlier attempts by Bridgestone-Seiko in 1987 of marketing a battery [1] were stopped in 1992.
Now in our days, a new concept is attracting a lot of interest, the “plastic LEDs” and the “plastic lasers” [74].
Other applications, although at least as challenging and interesting as batteries or LEDs and even much further advanced in the market, have not yet found any comparable attention by neither the science community, nor the broader public. So, most of our dispersion oriented research [2] - both fundamentally as applied oriented - is still widely unknown.
No application would ever be realized, if ICPs could not be processed, from an appropriate polymerization over intermediate process steps up to the final product. This problem was far from being trivial, as ICPs are insoluble and unmoldable. Moreover, this problem was also scientifically not unproductive at all: As we managed to find out why they are (or, as some people would say: were) insoluble and unmoldable, we learnt a lot about important basic properties of the ICPs, and maybe we even could overcome these drawbacks (as some scientists still hope), or, as I would say, have learnt to live with insolubility and unmoldability with the help of dispersion.
[1] J. Miller, Adv. Mater. 5 (9) 671 - 676 (1993), ref 10, 33
[2] for an overview, see B. Wessling,"Scientific and Commercial Breakthrough for Organic Metals", lecture at the ICSM '96 in Salt Lake City, to be published in Synth Met., Conference Proceedings
