Influence of the fullerene derivatives and cage polyhedral oligomeric silsesqiuoxanes on 3-aminopropyltrimethoxysilane based hybrid nanocomposites chemical, morphological and electrical properties Original Research Article

In this study we produced 3-aminopropyltrimethoxysilane based hybrid nanocomposites using fullerene derivative [6,6]phenylC61butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) as nanodopants. Additionally, we modified obtained material with incompletely condensed cage polyhedral oligomeric silsesqiuoxanes (POSS) in order to improve its properties. Thin films were deposited by means of the spin-coating method. The films were characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and capacitance–voltage (CV) measurements. We observed that a properly chosen PCBM concentration may be a crucial factor to obtain high quality APTMS based films by the spin-coating technique. XPS revealed the presence of the C-NH-C species within POSS containing films indicating chemical interaction between the amino group of APTMS and the POSS molecules. AFM results suggest that at high POSS monomer concentration in the range of 1% the creation of fractal-shaped aggregates takes place. The CV characterization of the samples exhibits a decrease of the APTMS based films dielectric constant due to the POSS and PCBM contribution. The combination of the applied methods delivers complementary information concerning the properties of the analyzed films.