Abstract:
In recent times, there is a growing trend among researchers in utilizing plant based starting materials to synthesize functional nanomaterials. Toward this goal, cashew nut shell oil-derived cardanol caught great attention due to its wide availability, low cost, easy isolation and unique molecular architecture. In this chapter, we summarize the literature based on soft template approach of cardanyl amphiphiles for fabricating conducting polymer (polyaniline and polypyrrole) nanostructures. The amphiphiles synthesized from cardanol has typical surfactant structure with sulfonic acid polar head and hydrophobic aliphatic tail, often referred as dopants due to its post-polymerization doping effect on polymer chain. The soft- templates were generated by selectively mixing monomer and dopants for different polymerization conditions such as emulsion, dilute, interfacial, dispersion and gel phase. The templates upon treatment with polymerization initiator produce conducting polymer morphology such as nanofibers, nanorods, nanotubes, nanospheres, hollow nanospheres and nanotapes. The cardanyl amphiphilic dopants electrostatically complex with conducting polymer nanomaterials and significantly improve the solubility, solid-state ordering, conductivity and optical properties.
