Eco-friendly biowaste-derived graphitic carbon as black pigment for conductive paint

Abstract

In this study, we developed a bio-inspired, eco-friendly, and cost-effective conductive paint (CP). Conventionally, carbon-based black pigment (CBP) was derived from cow dung, which is an eco-friendly, easily available, and inexpensive biowaste material. Subsequently, CP has been prepared using as-prepared CBP. Herein, for the first time, we used CBP as a conductive pigment that was mixed with an air-dried alkyd resin as a binder for paint formulation. As the conductive pigment, the CBP interconnected in the paint matrix by forming percolation pathways; this resulted in excellent conductive behavior of the as-prepared CP. The intermolecular interaction between the alkyd resin and the conductive pigment resulted in a CP that exhibited excellent conductivity as well as energy storage ability. The sheet resistance of the CP, studied using a four-probe resistivity method, was ∼8.61 × 10−7 Ω sq-1. The biowaste-derived CP also exhibited a high specific capacitance of 216 F g-1 and a high energy density of 24 Wh kg-1 at a current density of 1 A g-1. The main advantage of our prepared CP is better conductivity than that of carbon black, graphite, graphene, and carbon nanotube. As a result, the prepared CP may have applications in several fields, such as antistatic coatings, energy storage, electromagnetic shielding, and electronic circuits.