Electrospinning Versus Chemical Polymerization for Conductive Polymer Fibers: Reproducibility, Electrical Performance and Wearable Sensing

Conductive polymers (CPs) such as polyaniline (PANI), polypyrrole (PPy) and poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) combine electronic function with the processability of plastics, and one-dimensional CP fibers add high surface area and directional charge transport. This review compares chemical oxidative polymerization and electrospinning against three criteria: how fiber geometry is reported and controlled, electrical performance, and wearable-sensor behavior. The comparison separates the chemistry that forms the polymer from the operation that forms the fiber, because the two are frequently conflated. Fiber diameter is reported as a numeric range wherever a dedicated spinning step defines it, whether by electrospinning or by wet spinning, and qualitatively where the fiber forms by precipitation during polymerization. This is a difference in reporting practice and in dimensional uniformity; it is not evidence of batch to batch or inter-laboratory reproducibility, for which no data were found for either route. Electrical comparison is complicated by measurement geometry, since single-fiber, mat, pellet and sheet-resistance values span one to three orders of magnitude across the surveyed literature and are not interchangeable. Where a single study varies one factor at a time, carrier removal and post-spinning conversion recover much of the apparent electrical deficit of electrospun fibers. Reported wearable-sensing metrics are not comparable across transduction modes, and the surveyed devices differ in composition and added conductive phases, so no ranking by fabrication route is drawn. The two routes are complementary: chemical polymerization supplies the conducting phase and scales by batch volume, while electrospinning sets the fiber architecture.