Leveraging Insulator's Tacticity in Semiconducting Polymer Blends.

Blending conjugated polymers with insulating matrices is often utilized for engineering extrinsic properties in organic electronics. Semiconductor/insulator blends are typically processed to form a uniformly distributed network of conductive domains within the insulating matrix, marrying electronic and physical properties from individual components. Understanding of polymer-polymer interactions in such systems is thus crucial for property co-optimization.

Polymer-Based Thermally Stable Chemiresistive Sensor for Real-Time Monitoring of NO Gas Emission.

We present a thermally stable, mechanically compliant, and sensitive polymer-based NO gas sensor design. Interconnected nanoscale morphology driven from spinodal decomposition between conjugated polymers tethered with polar side chains and thermally stable matrix polymers offers judicious design of NO-sensitive and thermally tolerant thin films. The resulting chemiresitive sensors exhibit stable NO sensing even at 170 °C over 6 h.

Molecularly Hybridized Conduction in DPP-Based Donor-Acceptor Copolymers toward High-Performance Iono-Electronics.

Iono-electronics, that is, transducing devices able to translate ionic injection into electrical output, continue to demand a variety of mixed ionic-electronic conductors (MIECs). Though polar sidechains are widely used in designing novel polymer MIECs, it remains unclear to chemists how much balance is needed between the two antagonistic modes of transport (ion permeability and electronic charge transport) to yield high-performance materials. Here, the impact of molecularly hybridizing ion permeability and charge mobility in semiconducting polymers on their performance in electrochemical and synaptic transistors is investigated.