ABSTRACT
Conducting polymers have now been known for more than 20 years. In 1977 the American scientists Reeger and MacDiarmid discovered that doping polyacetylene (PA) with iodine endowed the polymer with metallic properties, including an increase in conductivity of I 0 orders of magnitude [l]. The successful doping of PA -in electrochemical terminology the equivalent of oxidation or reduction---encourage the same scientists to test PA as a rechargeable active battery electrode [2]. Their promising results stimulated worldwide efforts to construct a polymer battery. In the course of these studies, conducting polymers with properties similar to PA were discovered, such as polyphenylene (PP) and polyphenylenevinylenes, as pure hydrocarbons, on the one hand, and polypyrrole (PPy) polythiophene (PTh), and polyaniline (P ANI) on the other hand.
