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This work focuses on the structural and electrical properties of solid biopolymer blend electrolytes based on chitosan and methylcellulose incorporated with lithium tetrafluoroborate (LiBF 4 ). The polymer electrolyte films were prepared by solution casting technique. The polymer blend comprised of 75 wt.% chitosan and 25 wt.% methylcellulose, the most amorphous blend composition are used as the host matrix. Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy analysis demonstrated the interactions between biopolymer blend and LiBF 4 . The highest value of electrical conductivity at ambient temperature 3.74×10 −6 S cm −1 was obtained for the sample containing 40 wt.% LiBF 4 . All electrolyte samples were found to obey the Arrhenius rule. The magnitude of activation energy decreases with increasing electrical conductivity and vice-versa. Rice and Roth model was applied to analyze the electrical conductivity enhancement. The temperature dependence of the frequency exponent (s) shows that the conduction mechanism depends on the salt concentration, the appropriate model for low concentration was found to be correlated barrier hopping (CBH) model, while for high salt concentration samples follow the non-overlapping small polaron tunneling (NSPT) model.

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Proton conducting nanocomposite solid polymer electrolytes (NSPEs) based on polyvinyl alcohol/ammonium nitrate (PVA/NH4NO3) and different contents of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO-NPs) have been prepared using the casting solution method. The XRD analysis revealed that the sample with 2 wt.% ZnO-NPs has a high amorphous content. The ionic conductivity analysis for the prepared membranes has been carried out over a wide range of frequencies at varying temperatures. Impedance analysis shows that sample with 2 wt.% ZnO-NPs has a smaller bulk resistance compared to that of undoped polymer electrolyte. A small amount of ZnO-NPs was found to enhance the proton-conduction significantly; the highest obtainable room-temperature ionic conductivity was 4.71 × 10−4 S/cm. The effect of ZnO-NP content on the transport parameters of the prepared proton-conducting NSPEs was investigated using the Rice–Roth model; the results reveal that the increase in ionic conductivity is due to an increment in the number of proton ions and their mobility.

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