Investigating electrical conductivity and antimicrobial performance of niobium oxide and praseodymium oxide nanoparticles filled Chitosan-PVA polymer blends

[Display omitted] •PVA/CS/Nb2O5/Pr6O11 films prepared via casting method.•The thermal stability of the nanocomposites significantly improved as the concentration of Pr6O11 increased.•The dielectric characteristics were greatly improved by the addition of Pr6O11.•The antibacterial activity of PVA/CS/Nb2O5/Pr6O11 films was improved by the addition of Pr6O11.•These nanocomposites are well-suited for electronic and biomedical applications. Energy storage has shown interest in CS-PVA-based composites due to their antibacterial and biocompatible characteristics. For biological research, chitosan (CS)-polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) doped with Nb2O5-Pr6O11 composites are being investigated. The structural study is verified by FT-IR/XRD/EDX/XPS analysis. SEM measurement shows that the size of Nb2P5 rods ranges between 0.5 and 0.8 µm. The effect of Oxy-dopants variation on the optical characterization of CS-PVA-based composites was examined. All samples exhibit high stability until 400 °C which is detected through thermal analysis. The largest indirect band gap is also found in pure CS-PVA, and it decreases with oxy-dopants and hits 2.95 eV for CS-PVA-Nb2O5-10 % Pr6O11. Furthermore, the decrease in the band gap is consistent with the data from the XRD investigation and indicates enhanced crystalline ordering. The refractive index also decreases upon adding dopants to reach a value of 2.2 at CS-PVA-Nb2O5-10 % Pr6O11. Plots of ε’ and ε’’ show a diminishing trend as frequency increases, with constant values at higher frequencies. Introduced as the antibacterial activity that is most effective against S. aureus and E. coli is the CS-PVA-Nb2O5-30 %Pr6O11 with values of 14.3 ± 0.2 and 16 ± 0.3 mm respectively. All of the aforementioned arguments suggest the utilization of CS-PVA-based composites in electrical and biological applications.