POLYANILINE NANOPARTICLES WITH NOVEL PROPERTIES

S. BONGIOVANNI ABEL; M.A. MOLINA; C.A. BARBERO

Bahía Blanca

Simposio; IX SIMPOSIO ARGENTINO DE POLIMEROS; 2011

Universidad Nacional del Sur

Polyaniline nanoparticles (PANI NP) are small objects which are suitable as multifunction vectors for insertion of bioactive principles into living cells like Barbero et al (2010) has shown. Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) is a termoresponsive polymer which suffers a coil to globule transition at ca. 32 °C from a hydrophilic to a hydrophobic state. Hydroxypropylcellulose (HPC) is an anphyphilic macromolecule with a similar thermosensitive behavior, with a transition temperature of ca. 50 °C. On the other side, it is known that conductive polymers strongly absorb electromagnetic radiation, particularly in the microwave range, with heating up of the polymer (Wu C Y and Benatar A, 1997). PANI NP can be easily synthesized by nucleation and growth oxidative polymerization (Stejskal and Sapurina, 2005), using a polymeric stabilizer. Using different stabilizers we can tune the properties of the nanoparticles. In this work we show the synthesis of PANI NP by a simple rout, using PVP, PNIPAM or HPC as stabilizers. We characterized the size of the NP by dynamic light scattering and its optical properties by UV-vis spectroscopy. Additionally, we studied the stability of the dispersion at different temperatures. Besides, it was shown that PANI NPs, dispersed in water, absorb microwave radiation, increasing their temperature (Molina M.A. et al, 2011). We test the behavior of the nanoparticles upon irradiation with microwaves.