Conductive bio - Polymer electrolyte with lithium salt for application in electrochemical device

Abstract

Polymer electrolytes are the emerging materials for electrochemical device applications such as high energy density batteries, fuel cells, supercapacitors, electrochromic displays, etc. Polymer electrolytes has gone through different developmental stages, starting from dry solid polymer electrolyte (SPE) systems to plasticized, gels, rubbery to micro/nano-composite polymer electrolytes. The main two factors that retard the applications of synthetic polymer electrolytes are High cost and not “environmentally green”. Hence to overcome this shortcomings of synthetic polymers biopolymers have gained enormous attention which raises the significance due to global warming and energy crisis. The present work focuses on the characteristics of bio polymer electrolyte based on pectin and lithium nitrate. The electrolytes were prepared using the solution casting method. A.C. impedance spectroscopy shows that the biopolymer containing 30 wt% Pectin: 70wt%LiNO3 has highest ionic conductivity of 3.97 x 10−3 Scm−1 [1]. The analysis also proves that the magnitude of ionic conductivity increases with an increase in temperature for which the activation energy is minimum. The values of glass transition temperature (Tg) using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analysis predicts values, which reveals that the Tg value increase with respect to the increase of LiNO 3. Transference number measurement confirms that the conducting species are Li ion. Primary lithium-ion battery has been constructed using best conducting bio polymer electrolyte membrane, and the open circuit voltage (OCV) has been observed as 1.4 V.