Abstract

Over the past decade, bioinspired synthesis methods have offered efficient green strategies to fabricate complex nanomaterials that are highly efficient and sustainable. Various novel bioinspired structures have been discovered with potential applications in electrochemical energy storage/conversion. The main advantage of bioinspired synthesis methods over conventional methodologies is that they utilize naturally abundant resources for the fabrication of electrode nanomaterials using simple, low-cost processes. For example, carbon-based materials are derived from biomass to fabricate efficient electrodes for supercapacitor (SC) applications. Investigation of structural or functional properties of electrode materials at the nanoscale has gained significant interest due to their outperforming properties and unique advantages. This book chapter focuses on bio-resources and bio-templates while giving a brief introduction to bioinspired nanomaterials. It highlights bioinspired synthetic strategies and explains artificial biostructures applied to design electrodes with optimal characteristics that significantly broaden the research opportunity. Moreover, it discusses the complex structures of the bioinspired nanomaterials, like bionic function, hierarchical porosity, etc., that help in improving their electrochemical performance, along with describing their physical and chemical structures. The chapter provides a thorough study of the recent developments of bioinspired nanomaterial-based SCs and explains their improved electrochemical properties like cycling stability, energy density, etc. Apart from summarizing the recent advances in the field, it gives a detailed description of the future scope for enhancing the performance of these materials for energy storage as well as other potential applications.