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Creators/Authors contains: "Serrano-Garcia, William"

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  1. Fiber electronics, such as those produced by the electrospinning technique, have an extensive range of applications including electrode surfaces for batteries and sensors, energy storage, electromagnetic interference shielding, antistatic coatings, catalysts, drug delivery, tissue engineering, and smart textiles. New composite materials and blends from conductive–semiconductive polymers (C-SPs) offer high surface area-to-volume ratios with electrical tunability, making them suitable for use in fields including electronics, biofiltration, tissue engineering, biosensors, and “green polymers”. These materials and structures show great potential for embedded-electronics tissue engineering, active drug delivery, and smart biosensing due to their electronic transport behavior and mechanical flexibility with effective biocompatibility. Doping, processing methods, and morphologies can significantly impact the properties and performance of C-SPs and their composites. This review provides an overview of the current literature on the processing of C-SPs as nanomaterials and nanofibrous structures, mainly emphasizing the electroactive properties that make these structures suitable for various applications. 
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  2. In this study, morphology and in vitro response of electroconductive composite nanofibers were explored for biomedical use. The composite nanofibers were prepared by blending the piezoelectric polymer poly(vinylidene fluoride–trifluorethylene) (PVDF-TrFE) and electroconductive materials with different physical and chemical properties such as copper oxide (CuO), poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT), copper phthalocyanine (CuPc), and methylene blue (MB) resulting in unique combinations of electrical conductivity, biocompatibility, and other desirable properties. Morphological investigation via SEM analysis has remarked some differences in fiber size as a function of the electroconductive phase used, with a reduction of fiber diameters for the composite fibers of 12.43% for CuO, 32.87% for CuPc, 36.46% for P3HT, and 63% for MB. This effect is related to the peculiar electroconductive behavior of fibers: measurements of electrical properties showed the highest ability to transport charges of methylene blue, in accordance with the lowest fibers diameters, while P3HT poorly conducts in air but improves charge transfer during the fiber formation. In vitro assays showed a tunable response of fibers in terms of viability, underlining a preferential interaction of fibroblast cells to P3HT-loaded fibers that can be considered the most suitable for use in biomedical applications. These results provide valuable information for future studies to be addressed at optimizing the properties of composite nanofibers for potential applications in bioengineering and bioelectronics. 
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  3. Abstract Charge transport in electrostatically doped poly[benzimidazobenzophenanthroline]‐BBL thin films in a field‐effect transistor geometry were investigated in the temperature range 150 K < T < 370 K. At low temperatures activation and hopping transport mechanisms dominated, while phonon scattering dominated at high temperatures. The activation energies (EA) were found to lie in the range 140 meV < EA < 400 meV implying the existence of deep traps within the polymer bandgap of 1.8 eV. Two quasi‐linear dependencies ofEAon the gate voltage (Vg) were observed withEAdecreasing asVgincreased. An unexpected “metallic‐like” transport characteristic appeared forT > 335 K which depended onVg. Enhanced electron delocalization combined with increased carrier density could be responsible for this “metallic‐like” behavior. Our results show that the existence of deep traps with multiple energy distributions, combined with increased carrier density led to the unusual temperature dependence of charge transport observed in BBL. 
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