There are growing concerns over the environmental, climate, and health impacts caused by using non‐renewable fossil fuels. The utilization of green energy, including solar and wind power, is believed to be one of the most promising alternatives to support more sustainable economic growth. In this regard, lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) can play a critically important role. To further increase the energy and power densities of LIBs, silicon anodes have been intensively explored due to their high capacity, low operation potential, environmental friendliness, and high abundance. The main challenges for the practical implementation of silicon anodes, however, are the huge volume variation during lithiation and delithiation processes and the unstable solid‐electrolyte interphase (SEI) films. Recently, significant breakthroughs have been achieved utilizing advanced nanotechnologies in terms of increasing cycle life and enhancing charging rate performance due partially to the excellent mechanical properties of nanomaterials, high surface area, and fast lithium and electron transportation. Here, the most recent advance in the applications of 0D (nanoparticles), 1D (nanowires and nanotubes), and 2D (thin film) silicon nanomaterials in LIBs are summarized. The synthetic routes and electrochemical performance of these Si nanomaterials, and the underlying reaction mechanisms are systematically described.

This paper gives a comprehensive review about the most recent progress in synthesis, characterization, fundamental understanding, and the performance of graphene and graphene oxide sponges. Practical applications are considered including use in composite materials, as the electrode materials for electrochemical sensors, as absorbers for both gases and liquids, and as electrode materials for devices involved in electrochemical energy storage and conversion. Several advantages of both graphene and graphene oxide sponges such as three dimensional graphene networks, high surface area, high electro/ thermo conductivities, high chemical/electrochemical stability, high flexibility and elasticity, and extremely high surface hydrophobicity are emphasized. To facilitate further research and development, the technical challenges are discussed, and several future research directions are also suggested in this paper. Broader contextAdvanced graphene materials residing at the frontier of scientic research offer immense potential for overcoming the challenges related to the performance, functionality and durability of key functional materials' in the elds of life science, energy, and the environment. Future demand necessitates advanced processing methods be developed that can mass produce high quality, two-dimensional graphene sheets while overcoming the issues of poor dispersion and restacking with large size-scale deployment of two-dimensional graphene sheets. These issues, along with graphene sheet defects and multilayer thicknesses prevent the full realization of graphene's high potential, including electronic properties and high surface area. Three-dimensional arrangements have been recently able to address these limitations, by creating sponge-like low density materials with a long list of benecial properties including: macroscale size, high accessible surface area, less restacking, highly-interconnected microstructure, high strength and exibility, fast ion transport and electron conductivity. This review is intended to address the continued developments and challenges with a wide scope of interest, highlighting fundamental understanding of the synthesis and characterization procedures, future outlook, as well as an in-depth discussion of application areas reporting high performance in recent publications. The outstanding potential of these materials has enabled signicant enhancements for numerous important applications such as electrochemical energy storage and conversion, absorption, sensing, catalysis, transistors and polymer composites.

Silicon has been intensively studied as an anode material for lithium-ion batteries (LIB) because of its exceptionally high specific capacity. However, silicon-based anode materials usually suffer from large volume change during the charge and discharge process, leading to subsequent pulverization of silicon, loss of electric contact, and continuous side reactions. These transformations cause poor cycle life and hinder the wide commercialization of silicon for LIBs. The lithiation and delithiation behaviors, and the interphase reaction mechanisms, are progressively studied and understood. Various nanostructured silicon anodes are reported to exhibit both superior specific capacity and cycle life compared to commercial carbon-based anodes. However, some practical issues with nanostructured silicon cannot be ignored, and must be addressed if it is to be widely used in commercial LIBs. This Review outlines major impactful work on silicon-based anodes, and the most recent research directions in this field, specifically, the engineering of silicon architectures, the construction of silicon-based composites, and other performance-enhancement studies including electrolytes and binders. The burgeoning research efforts in the development of practical silicon electrodes, and full-cell silicon-based LIBs are specially stressed, which are key to the successful commercialization of silicon anodes, and large-scale deployment of next-generation high energy density LIBs.