Synthesis and conductive properties of a novel azobenzene-based conjugated polymer

•Synthesize and purify a series of conductive polymer with azobenzene as backbone.•We study the conductive and optical absorption of the polymers.•Two polymers can be solidified from the semi-solid state, and are more prospective.•The cheap polymers can be widely used in photovoltaic devices and PLED device.

The conjugated polymer with an azobenzene backbone can be synthesized by diazotization and coupling using the common raw such as m-phenylenediamine, p-phenylenediamine, o-phenylenediamine and o-aminophenol. The products obtained by the different synthesis conditions are very different. For example, the solubility and the conductivity are very different with a different greater proportion of the product NaNO2. The conductivity of synthetic polymers were studied after doping, the results show that the conductivity of synthetic polymers can be improved by controlling the doping ratio of NaNO2 and the draw ratio dopant. As the result, poly(azo-o-phenylenediamine), and poly(azo-o-aminophenol) are relatively more worthy of further study in the four different types of polymers, because the two materials are semi-solid state, the future research will be focused on solidification the materials. The novel material will be a cheap and popularize material and be used widely.