Synthesis of hierarchical Polystyrene/Polyaniline@Au nanostructures of different surface states and studies of their catalytic properties

We synthesized hierarchical Polystyrene/Polyaniline@Au (PS/PANI@Au) catalysts through a seeded swelling polymerization and in-situ reduction procedure. PS/PANI@Au catalysts possess a core of PS as seed and template, a PANI shell with fibers and uniform gold nanoparticles on the surface. The configuration changes of the PANI chains resulting from the doping/dedoping procedure led to various loading amounts of Au nanoparticles. Reduction of 4-nitrophenol was chosen as the probe reaction to evaluate the catalytic activity of supported Au nanocatalysts. The catalytic results indicated that dedoping treatment of the PS/PANI supports provides stronger coordinative ability to metal nanoparticles as well as more -N= groups, which results in a better catalytic performance towards the reduction of 4-nitrophenol.