Crab Chitin‐Based 2D Soft Nanomaterials for Fully Biobased Electric Devices

Abstract

2D nanomaterials have various size/morphology-dependent properties applicable in electronics, optics, sensing, and actuating. However, intensively studied inorganic 2D nanomaterials are frequently hindered to apply in some particular and industrial fields, owing to harsh synthesis, high-cost, cytotoxicity, and nondegradability. Endeavor has been made to search for biobased 2D nanomaterials with biocompatibility, sustainability, and biodegradability. A method of hydrophobization-induced interfacial-assembly is reported to produce an unprecedented type of nanosheets from marine chitin. During this process, two layers of chitin aggregations assemble into nanosheets with high aspect ratio. With super stability and amphiphilicity, these nanosheets have super ability in creating highly stable Pickering emulsions with internal phase up to 83.4% and droplet size up to 140 μm, in analogue to graphene oxide. Combining emulsifying and carbonization can further convert these 2D precursors to carbon nanosheets with thickness as low as ≈3.8 nm. Having biologic origin, conductivity, and dispersibility in various solvents, resultant carbon nanosheets start a new scenario of exploiting marine resources for fully biobased electric devices with sustainability and biodegradability, e.g., supercapacitor, flexible circuits, and electronic sensors. Hybrid films of chitin and carbon nanosheets also offer low-cost and environment-friendly alternative of conductive components desirable in green electronics, wearable electronics, biodegradable circuits, and biologic devices.

Carbon materials derived from chitosan/cellulose cryogel-supported zeolite imidazole frameworks for potential supercapacitor application

“…Since they have high specific surface areas (SSA), suitable pore size and good electrical conductivity. As a new type of nanoporous carbon materials, carbon cryogel derived from carbohydrate polymers such as cellulose (CL), chitosan (CS) is environmental friendly, and owns high conductivity and thermal stability, which is an ideal electrode material for energy storage (Frindy et al, 2017;Wan & Li, 2017;You, Li, Ding, Wu & Li, 2017). However, such nanoporous carbon materials are easy to agglomerate during pyrolysis because of the loss of oxygen-containing groups in high temperature.…”

Biomass-derived carbon materials with structural diversities and their applications in energy storage

“…You et al [72] used chitin fibers extracted from portunid to prepare polysaccharides nanosheets with the thickness of~27 nm by hydrophobization-induced interfacial assembly and further carbonizing into carbon nanosheets with a thickness as low as~3.8 nm. Recently, our group prepared a 3D honeycomb-like hierarchical carbon by one-step carbonization/activation soaked in KOH solution of fibrous bacterial cellulose [61] (Fig.…”

“…All the characteristics strongly suggest that biomass-derived carbon could be qualified for the electrode of supercapacitors. To date, various biomass-derived carbon materials with high SSA, abundant pore structure and modified functional groups have been prepared, such as the stems [87,102,157,[177][178][179], leaves [34,90,101,103,126], seeds [48,77,79,154], fructus [180][181][182], pericarp [88,89] of plants, nut shells [94,143,[183][184][185], fungi [53,109,[186][187][188], abandoned food [96,131,189], shellfish [49,72,133], animal tissue [112,115,124], polysaccharide [44,85,147,155,190], protein [137].…”

The Renewable and Sustainable Conversion of Chitin into a Chiral Nitrogen‐Doped Carbon‐Sheath Nanofiber for Enantioselective Adsorption

“…Recently,w er eported ac hemical-etching-free approach for the disintegration of chitin nanofibrils from bulk chitin by using calciumi ons that ultimately yieldedachiral nematic chitin hy-drogel withoutt he need for at emplate and hydrolysis with strong acids. [32][33][34][35][36] The method for the synthesis of the N-doped chiral carbonsheath nanofibril hydrogel is shown schematically in Figure 1b and described in detail in the Supporting Information. [15,29,30] This method facilitates long-range chiral nematic organization in the carbon hydrogel and has the advantage of requiringo nly af ew mild synthetic steps.T he chiral Ndoped carbon nanofibril hydrogel can potentially be used in a variety of applications in the environmental and nanomaterials fields [31] and is as ustainable andr enewable nanomaterial.…”