ABSTRACT
Conductive polymers can be realized in two ways. One is to produce a polymer that is intrinsically conductive. Heeger et al. received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 for developing these intrinsically conductive polymers (ICPs). However, commonly used ICPs such as polyacetylene, polyaniline, and polypyrrole have typical conductivity values around 10-10 to 105S/m. They do not have stable mechanical properties and are expensive and difžcult to prepare, particularly during polymerization (Cotts and Reyes 1986, Nalwa 1997, Morgan and Foot 2001). The second approach is to dope or load conductive žllers into an insulator. Graphite, carbon powders, and metallic particles are widely used. Due to very low cost and convenient fabrication (only conventional processes are required to prepare polymers), the latter approach is more popular in engineering practice (Jäger et al. 2001, Thommerel et al. 2002, Zheng and Wong 2003).
