Investigation of the Potential of Proton-Conducting Biopolymer Electrolytes Based Methyl Cellulose-Glycolic Acid

Investigation of methyl cellulose (MC) doped with glycolic acid (GA) as proton-conducting biopolymer electrolytes (PCBEs) has been carried out in this work. The solution-casting method was incorporated to prepare the MC-GA film and FT-IR was used to study complexation of MC and GA. The sample containing 20 wt.% of GA exhibited the highest room temperature conductivity of 7.16 × 10−10 Scm−1. In addition, temperature dependence of ionic conductivity obeys the Arrhenius rule. The transference number measurement (TNM) of mobile ions has been estimated by the dc polarization method, and it has been proven that the conducting species are predominantly due to protons.