Inducing conductivity in immiscible PS/PP blends by a percolated polyaniline/PA filler selectively localised by specific interactions

We describe an approach to develop conducting immiscible blends of polystyrene (PS) and polypropylene (PP) with a percolated polyaniline/polyamide (PANI/PA) filler in the presence of a SEBS-g-MA compatibilizer. The underlying principle of the work is the ability of the compatibilizer to concurrently stabilize the bi-phasic morphology to develop co-continuous blends and to improve the dispersion of the filler by specific interactions. From the latter perspective, we have chosen a percolated composite of PANI in PA as the filler and prepared its master batches with the compatibilizer expecting that specific interactions between the amino end groups of PA and the MA anhydride groups in SEBS-g-MA would result in a better dispersion of PANI. The effect of master batch preparation method using either melt mixing or solution casting on the conductivity was studied, and the latter technique was found to be superior. As a result, the concomitant effect of morphology stabilization with improved PANI dispersion led ...