On the design of surface attached customizable-size conductive micro/nano-fibers by femtosecond direct laser interference patterning

LUCINDA MULKO; HERMAN HEFFNER; ROBERT BAUMANN; ANDRÉS FABIÁN LASAGNI

Darmstadt

Congreso; Materials Science and Engineering Congress (MSE); 2022

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Materialkunde (DGM)

Research concerning to conductive polymers has earned significant interests since their discoverers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000. Particularly, composite conductive materials allows to merge highly conductive properties with excellent mechanical properties allowing a plethora of applications from optoelectronics to biomedicine. This work aims to design and develop a composite material constituted of a nano-coated conducting polymer (PANI) attached to bioinert polymer (PANI@PMMA) and post-synthesis modified by direct laser interference patterning (DLIP).The pattern of the PANI@PMAA was achieved by using an 0.9 fs laser source (Luximar LXR 100-1030, Luximar GmbH, Germany) at 1030 nm. The fixed periodicity of the line structured was 12 μm. DLIP, allows selectively remove the coating material in PANI@PMMA in the maximum interference positions while the minimum interference positions remain unchanged. Hence, achieving a symmetrical dielectric valley/conductive ridge line-like structure. An exploratory study of fluences (energy per area) and pulse-to-pulse overlapping (impinged pulses) was carried out on the PANI@PMMA. In this way, these structures can be customized to the required width/depth to obtain conductive PANI micro to nanofibers of variable width from 5 μm to 600 nm and depths up 950 nm.The combination of advanced functional materials with state-of-the-art laser techniques enabled the generation of substrates with periodic structures and modified (anisotropic) properties that can be easily scaled-up to larger sizes and have great potential for numerous and diverse applications.