Chitin and Chitosan Based Composites for Energy and Environmental Applications: A Review

Abstract

Chitin and chitosan are the second most abundant natural biopolymers in the curst of the earth. These polysaccharide biopolymers have a long linear chain-like structure connected with β-d glucosidic linkage with the functionalizable surface groups. Because of the structural features, these biomaterials exhibit unique physical, chemical, mechanical and optical properties, which contributed to the tunable and outstanding properties such as low density, high porosity, renewability, natural biodegradability, and environmental friendliness, etc. Chitin was synthesized via mechanical, chemical, chemo-mechanical, and eco-friendly biological methods and the deacetylation of the synthesized chitin carried for the preparation of chitosan. With the chemical modification used for the preparation of chitosan, there occurs some minor change in characteristics; however, most of the properties were relatable due to major similarities in the microstructures. The inherent antibacterial, non-toxic, and biodegradable properties with the ease of processibility of both polymer has the potential to become a successful alternative to its synthetic counterparts for energy and environmental applications. However, the poor mechanical and thermal properties in comparison to the conventional alternatives have restricted its widespread applications. This review addresses various areas such as extraction techniques of chitin and synthesis of chitosan, discussion of the common characteristics of both polymers together such as crystallinity, thermal properties, mechanical properties, hydrophilicity, and surface charge. Moreover, this review paper also addresses the common functionalization techniques for both polymer and the use of both unmodified chitin and chitosan along with their derivatives in environmental and energy applications such as air pollution, heavy metal adsorption, dye adsorption, biosensors, EMI shielding, fuel cell, solar cell, lithium-ion batteries, and biofuels.

Ionotropic Gelation of Chitosan Flat Structures and Potential Applications

“…Chitosan has been used in wastewater treatment for over 30 years because its excellent coagulation, flocculation and metal chelation properties due to the high number of amino and hydroxyl groups in the chemical structure of Chit [ 142 , 143 ]. Solids contained in food processing wastes and dyes coming from textile industry can be removed by taking advantage of the coagulation and flocculation properties of chitosan.…”

“…Antibacterial and environmentally friendly chitosan-based flat membranes have been also investigated for air filtration (see a collection of papers in [ 142 ]) to prevent environmental and human body pollution, especially by particulate matter (PM). PM has a long lifetime and adsorbs toxic compounds and bacteria in the air due to the larger surface areas, and can penetrate into the respiratory system and even the blood.…”

A biopolymer with antimicrobial properties and plant resistance inducer against phytopathogens: Chitosan

“…It is a lineal polymer formed by N-D glucosamine (2-amino-2-deoxy-β-D glucopyranose) monomers, bound by β-1-4 (Katiyar et al, 2015). Chitin is a natural and abundant biopolymer found in many organism (Fournier et al, 2020;López-Corona et al, 2020) (Table 1) and is compound of 2-acetylamine-2-deoxy-β-Dglucopyranose units (Peter et al, 2020). The main forms of application of chitosan are: seed coating, soil enrichment, foliar spraying, fruit coating, nanoparticles, among others (Morin-Crini et al, 2019).…”

Plasticized Polymer Blend Electrolyte Based on Chitosan for Energy Storage Application: Structural, Circuit Modeling, Morphological and Electrochemical Properties

“…The energy production and storage devices have caused serious issues, especially their environmental impacts and global warming issues [ 26 , 27 ]. Furthermore, the related electronic waste has beenfound to be fatal for many living species.…”