Conducting Polymers: Methods for Enhancing the Electric Conductivity

Driven by the immeasurable prospect of the applications in the reality on the organic semiconductors, scientists had devoted a lot of effort into exploring the properties and their influence factors of these new materials that differ the conducting polymers from the conventional polymers. To maximize the electrical performance of the conducting polymers for practical usage, specific methods of altering both the physical and chemical properties by adjustments of material structures were sorted out. This paper will summarise three different types of changes that can be made to tune the properties for our real needs in two divided perspectives – structural modifications within and out of the molecules of the conducting materials, which are increasing the conjugation length, reducing the band gap, and doping respectively. Among which, the reduction of the band gap can be realized in six different more specific aspects: bond-length alternation, esonance energy, planarity of the conjugated structure, substituents effects, intermolecular interactions, donor-acceptor structure.