Conductivity and electrical studies of plasticized carboxymethyl cellulose based proton conducting solid biopolymer electrolytes

Abstract

In this paper, a proton conducting solid biopolymer electrolytes (SBE) comprises of carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) as polymer host, ammonium thiocyanate (NH4SCN) as doping salt and ethylene carbonate (EC) as plasticizer has been prepared via solution casting technique. Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) was carried out to study the conductivity and electrical properties of plasticized CMC-NH4SCN SBE system over a wide range of frequency between 50 Hz and 1 MHz at temperature range of 303 to 353 K. Upon addition of plasticizer into CMC-NH4SCN SBE system, the conductivity increased from 10-5 to 10-2 Scm-1. The highest conductivity was obtained by the electrolyte containing 10 wt.% of EC. The conductivity of plasticized CMC-NH4SCN SBE system by various temperatures obeyed Arrhenius law where the ionic conductivity increased as the temperature increased. The activation energy, Ea was found to decrease with enhancement of EC concentration. Dielectric studies for the highest conductivity electrolyte obeyed non-Debye behavior. The conduction mechanism for the highest conductivity electrolyte was determined by employing Jonsher’s universal power law and thus, can be represented by the quantum mechanical tunneling (QMT) model.