Recent Progress in Polysaccharide-Based Materials for Energy Applications: A Review

In recent years, polysaccharides have emerged as a promising alternative for the development of environmentally friendly materials. Polysaccharide-based materials have been mainly studied for applications in the food, packaging, and biomedical industries. However, many investigations report processing routes and treatments that enable the modification of the inherent properties of polysaccharides, making them useful as materials for energy applications. The control of the ionic and electronic conductivities of polysaccharide-based materials allows for the development of solid electrolytes and electrodes. The incorporation of conductive and semiconductive phases can modify the permittivities of polysaccharides, increasing their capacity for charge storage, making them useful as active surfaces of energy harvesting devices such as triboelectric nanogenerators. Polysaccharides are inexpensive and abundant and could be considered as a suitable option for the development and improvement of energy devices. This review provides an overview of the main research work related to the use of both common commercially available polysaccharides and local native polysaccharides, including starch, chitosan, carrageenan, ulvan, agar, and bacterial cellulose. Solid and gel electrolytes derived from polysaccharides show a wide range of ionic conductivities from 0.0173 × 10 –3 to 80.9 × 10 –3 S cm –1 . Electrodes made from polysaccharides show good specific capacitances ranging from 8 to 753 F g –1 and current densities from 0.05 to 5 A g –1 . Active surfaces based on polysaccharides show promising results with power densities ranging from 0.15 to 16 100 mW m –2 . These investigations suggest that in the future polysaccharides could become suitable materials to replace some synthetic polymers used in the fabrication of energy storage devices, including batteries, supercapacitors, and energy harvesting devices.