To date in your elementary science and high school courses you must have been taught repeatedly that the plastics are poor conductors of electricity and one of the reasons most of the insulations of electric wires are of plastic. But now conductor plastic may have given you goosebumps thinking what will save you from electric shocks now ?
Well the plastics will continue to be poor conductors. However researchers in Australia placed metal film inside plastics and made them to conduct electricity at a larger scale. So effectively it’s still the engineered product that is a conductor not the plastics you normally get by synthesis from compounds.
The techniques of fabricating such plastics is quite similar to the one used to fabricate semi-conductors like ion beam techniques that increase the amount of charge carriers to enhance conductivity.
Professor Paul Meredith from University of Queensland, one of the researchers heading this project says,”What the team has been able to do here is use an ion beam to tune the properties of a plastic film so that it conducts electricity like the metals used in the electrical wires themselves, and even to act as a superconductor and pass electric current without resistance if cooled to low enough temperature”
Application of ‘Conducting Plastics’
Electric Resistance Thermometer was developed as an application by the team to demonstrate the potential of this invention. The thermometers developed were of industrial standards, quite stable and very accurate. The research team also was pleased with the control over the conducting properties of the metal film and easiness in fabricating it. This can allow even to build plastics with a variable conducting range of several millions megaohms.
Other applications are going to be in plastic electronic components where small plastic gadgets will have these metal films inside rather than traditional circuits burnt into them. Also since the plastics are good conductors of heat, heating issues can also be addressed where cooling of electronics is an issue
Interesting thing is that these materials combine several properties of materials like strength,heat conductivity and hence can be used in applications where tradeoff in selection of materials has to be made with sometimes huge sacrifice in one aspect or another.
Interesting thing is that these materials combine several properties of materials like strength,heat conductivity and hence can be used in applications where tradeoff in selection of materials has to be made with sometimes huge sacrifice in one aspect or another.
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