ABSTRACT
Electronically Conducting Polymers (ECPs), which should now be better designated as conjugated polymers, have known a great success in fundamental research as well as – albeit not as widespread – in some applications since their discovery in the late seventies by the Nobel Prize winners Shirakawa, MacDiarmid and Heeger [1], and some others. As oxidation – or, rarely, reduction – reactions were involved in their first syntheses and many following, and even if modern organometallic coupling reactions have challenged this approach since the early 1990s, electrochemistry is naturally associated with conducting polymers. It is indeed not only a synthetic tool, but also merely an insight method into their properties (“electrochemical spectroscopy”) like the estimation of HOMO–LUMO energy levels, and more and more a “signature” tool in a wide panel of applications running through energy storage devices, sensors and actuators, or anti-corrosion coatings. This chapter intends to give the reader an overview of how electrochemistry is still involved in some of these various aspects, since other chapters of this handbook already cover some of the aforementioned fields. The outline will briefly summarize the fundamental knowledge to gradually mention more recent results in a non-exhaustive way, essentially targeting applications that will be described in the Section 5.4. Like most of other organic and inorganic materials, conjugated polymers have fully reached their nanosize era, and the use of electrochemical methods to build nanostructures, sometimes associated with other materials in nanocomposites, will be discussed. As an ever increasing part of electrodeposited conducting polymers applications is now anticorrosion, this field will be detailed in Section 5.4.5. We hope to provide to the reader, be he a beginner or a scientist already familiar with this field, both the basic knowledge and the present and future prospects in the electrochemical properties of conjugated polymers.
