To mitigate the use of fossil fuels and maintain a clean and sustainable environment, electrochemical energy storage systems are receiving great deal of attention, especially rechargeable batteries. This is also associated with the growing demand for electric vehicles, which urged the automotive industries to explore the capacities of new materials for use in lithium–ion batteries (LIBs). Graphite is still employed as an anode in large majority of currently available commercial LIBs preserving their better cyclic stability despite enormous research efforts to identify viable alternatives with improved power and energy density. From this point of view, antimony acts as a promising material because it has good theoretical capacity, high volumetric capacity, good reactivity with lithium and good electronic conductivities. Recently, there have been many works that focused on the development of antimony as an alternative anode. This review tries to give a bird’s eye view comprising the experimental and theoretical insights on the developments in the direction of using antimony and antimony composites as anodes for rechargeable Li.

Background: The organic effluents from industry remain one of the reasons for water contamination. By natural degradation process, it is difficult to remove this; hence finding an effective solution for this is inevitable. TiO2-based materials have received enormous attention in the area of semiconductor photocatalysis, particularly for the degradation of organic dyes. This work emphasize on the degradation of two industrial dyes methylene blue and rhodamine blue by visible light irradiation of TiO2 based nanoparticles. Methods: In the present study, pristine and La3+ and Ce3+ doped nanotitania were synthesized by sol-gel method. The samples under investigation were characterized using X-ray diffraction, Transmission electron microscopy to study the variation of crystallite size and UV-Visible absorption spectroscopy. Results: The increase in crystallite size for the pristine samples calcined at various temperatures confirms the effect of calcination temperature. Also, the doping reduced the size of the synthesized nanotitania. Visible light extended absorption spectra have been observed for the calcined samples and Ce3+ doped nanotitania. The La3+ doped sample showed a blue shift in the absorption confirming quantum confinement. The photocatalytic activity in the context of degradation of certain industrial dyes such as methylene blue and rhodamine blue has been investigated for the samples. Conclusion: The studies found that nanotitania consisting of mixed anatase-rutile phase exhibits higher degradation efficiency than that of pure anatase or rutile samples. Besides, photocatalytic dye degradation has been significantly improved for Ce3+ doped nanotitania compared to the pristine sample.