Facile chemical strategy to synthesize Ag@polypyrrole microarrays and investigating its anisotropic effect on polymer conductivity

A facile chemical approach was developed to fabricate microarrays (MAs) of Ag@polypyrrole nanocables (NCs). The strategy involved crosslinking the NCs by tetraethoxy silane (TEOS) under continuous pulse sonication without using a substrate. The material was characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM) coupled with EDX, which revealed the longitudinal interconnections within the nanocables and creating unidirectional alignment in the form of MAs. FT-IR and Raman spectroscopy was employed to characterize the encapsulating polymer as polypyrrole (ppy) around Ag nanowires (NWs). The microarrays produced red shift in surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of Ag NWs, and drastically improved the thermal stability and conductivity of encasing ppy. It has imparted anisotropic conductivity effect on ppy which resulted in sharp decrease in resistivity from 8.35 × 10¹⁰ Ω to 2.449 Ω, when NCs were isolated and crosslinked into MAs form, respectively. The drastic decrease in resistivity of ppy was due to the anisotropic effect produced by the MAs format of NWs.