A novel method for making highly dispersible conducting polymer and concentric graphitic carbon nano-spheres based on an undoped and functionalized polyaniline

A novel method has been successfully established for making highly dispersible conducting polymer nano-spheres with conveniently controllable sizes directly from preformed, undoped, butylthiofunctionalized polyaniline (Pani-SBu) in the absence of any stabilizer, surfactant, and/or functional protonic acid dopant. The success of this approach stemmed from the unique ability of Pani-SBu (prepared via the concurrent reduction and substitution method) to form a nanometer-sized spherical micelle-like self-assembly in the selected co-solvent medium as confirmed by dynamic light scattering studies. With further help of the dithiol treatment, the resultant soft non-isolable micelle-like self-assembly could then be converted into rigid, stable, and isolable nano-spheres. Preliminary studies indicated that these highly ordered undoped Pani-SBu nano-spheres could also serve as ideal precursor materials for making concentric graphitic carbon nano-spheres at relatively low processing temperatures.