The increasingly severe energy crisis has strengthened the determination to develop environmentally friendly energy. And hydrogen has emerged as a candidate for clean energy. Among many hydrogen generation methods, biohydrogen stands out due to its environmental sustainability, simple operating environment, and cost advantages. This review focuses on the rational design of catalysts for fermentative hydrogen production. The principles of microbial dark fermentation and photo‐fermentation are elucidated exhaustively. Various strategies to increase the efficiency of fermentative hydrogen production are summarized, and some recent representative works from microbial dark fermentation and photo‐fermentation are described. Meanwhile, perspectives and discussions on the rational design of catalysts for fermentative hydrogen production are provided.

Low efficiency of extracellular electron transfer (EET) is a major bottleneck in developing high-performance microbial fuel cells (MFCs). Herein, we construct Shewanella oneidensis MR-1@Au for the bioanode of MFCs. Through...

Impulsive underwater discharges have been investigated for many decades, yet the complex pre-breakdown processes that underpin their development are not fully understood. Higher pre-breakdown energy losses may lead to significant reduction in the magnitude and intensity of the pressure waves generated by expanding post-breakdown plasma channels. Thus, it is important to characterize these losses for different discharge types and to identify approaches to their reduction. The present paper analyses thermal pre-breakdown processes in the case of free path and wire-guided discharges in water: fast joule heating of a small volume of water at the high-voltage electrode and joule heating and the melting of the wire, respectively. The energy required for joule heating of the water and metallic wire have been obtained from thermal models, analysed and compared with the experimental pre-breakdown energy losses. Pressure impulses generated by free path and by wire-guided underwater discharges have also been investigated. It was shown that wire-guided discharges support the formation of longer plasma channels better than free path underwater discharges for the same energy available per discharge. This results in stronger pressure impulses developed by underwater wire-guided discharges. It has been shown that the pressure magnitude in the case of both discharge types is inversely proportional to the observation distance which is a characteristic of a spherical acoustic wave.