Current Progress in Biopolymer-Based Bionanocomposites and Hybrid Materials.

Current Progress in Biopolymer-Based Bionanocomposites and Hybrid Materials is a newly opened Special Issue of Polymers, which aims to publish original and review papers on the new scientific and applied research and make boundless contributions to the findings and understanding of the reinforcing effects of various synthetic and natural fibres on the performance of biopolymer composites [...].

Current Progress in Biopolymer-Based Bionanocomposites and Hybrid Materials is a newly opened Special Issue of Polymers, which aims to publish original and review papers on the new scientific and applied research and make boundless contributions to the findings and understanding of the reinforcing effects of various synthetic and natural fibres on the performance of biopolymer composites. This Special Issue also covers the hybrid nanofibre-reinforced biopolymer nanocomposites’ fundamentals, characterisation, and applications.

In recent years, the development of biopolymers based on constituents obtained from natural resources has been gaining much attention [1,2]. The exploitation of biopolymers to engineer advanced bionanocomposites and hybrid materials is the focus of increasing scientific activity, explained by the growing environmental concerns and the interest in the novel features and multiple functionalities of these macromolecules.

Today, nanomaterial-reinforced polymers are used in several applications including in packaging [2,3,4]; electronic, electrical, structural, and energy storage [5]; in automotives [6]; in filter, coating, and bone tissue engineering, and in drug delivery [7], and more. The continuous development and appearance on the market of new high-performance reinforcing nanomaterials in polymer composites have constituted a strong challenge for researchers to design and adapt new functional nano-composites for several applications. The term bionanocomposites was introduced several years ago to express an emerging class of bionano- and bionanohybrid materials, resulting from the reinforcement of biopolymers, such as proteins (gelatin, casein, soy, and gluten), polysaccharides (cellulose, starch, chitosan, pectin, alginate, carrageenan, and glycogen), lipids (cutin), and nucleic acids with inorganic or organic solids at the nanoscale [8,9,10,11,12,13]. Such organic fractions comprise nanocrystalline cellulose [14,15,16], nanofibrillated cellulose [17,18] (Figure 1), bacterial nanocellulose [19], and lignin nanoparticles [20], whereas inorganic fractions consist of finely divided solids, spanning from clays to phosphates or carbonates, whose origins can be either synthetic or natural.

Figure 1

Atomic force microscopy images show different structures between nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) and nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC).

As will become increasingly clear for the reader throughout the collection of authoritative research and reviews in this Special Issue, the relevance of coupling biopolymers with organic and inorganic fillers, through innovative architectures, is twofold. First, it contradicts the idea that biopolymers are either eco-friendly or high-performance. Second, it demonstrates how the properties resulting from these biopolymers are highly significant in applications such as food packaging, water treatment, gas-diffusion barriers, electronic devices, agriculture, sensing devices, flame retardancy, automotive parts, adhesives, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, and drug delivery [21].

In this Special Issue, we aim to capture the cutting edge of the state of the art in research pertaining to biopolymer-based bionanocomposites and hybrid materials and their advanced applications. Contributions to the processing of biopolymers and bionanocomposites, the use of diverse biopolymer sources such as polysaccharides, the reinforcement of nanosized materials with biopolymers, and applications of these biopolymers, bionanocomposites, and biohybrid materials will constitute the backbone of this Special Issue.