Hey guys, these days I am using electropolymerization to form polymer film.
I mimiced the procedure of the paper, and got very thin membrane (~hundreds of nanometer), while the paper says they have in 35 micrometers.
I repeated several times and same thing happened.
attached is my electropolymerization process cv fig.
Water and oxygen are removed form the system, solvent is DMSO.
Working electrode is ITO.
Thanks a lot!
A very thin layer means your polymerization did not proceed well. It could be related to monomer, dopant, cleanliness of electrode surface, size of auxiliary electrode, wet connections.
I would advice consideration of increase in monomer concentration, with this a thicker polymeric film can be obtained. Also, the voltammetric sweep could also be increased.
The first thing is the proper cleaning of the substrate in thin film deposition. Any kind of debris will affect your file. In electrodeposition, the surface-activeness of the substrate plays a dominant role in film deposition. You should clean the substrate properly, increase the concentration of monomer and sweep voltage.
Hi Ziye
The most determinative parameters with the order of importance are:
1. the quality of cleaning and probably surface activation (which can be chemical or physical)
2. cyclic voltammetry scan rate. All the time to have a uniform layer it is better to utilize slow scan rate (5 or 10 mVs-1 might be fine)
3. counter electrode surface area should be much much bigger than working to doesn't act as buttle-neck in your electropolymerization reaction.
4. concentration of monomers also is crucial, more concentration is not all the time better, it might increase the non-uniformity of the deposited layer. So the optimum should be determined.
5. presence of oxygen inside the solution might increase the risk of oxidation and self-polymerization for some types of polymers. So bubbling with N2 for at least 10 minutes would be helpful.
I hope the mentioned points help you to find the good experimental condition.
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