Nanomaterials for renewable energy production and storage

Abstract

Over the past decades, there have been many projections on the future depletion of the fossil fuel reserves on earth as well as the rapid increase in green-house gas emissions. There is clearly an urgent need for the development of renewable energy technologies. On a different frontier, growth and manipulation of materials on the nanometer scale have progressed at a fast pace. Selected recent and significant advances in the development of nanomaterials for renewable energy applications are reviewed here, and special emphases are given to the studies of solar-driven photocatalytic hydrogen production, electricity generation with dye-sensitized solar cells, solidstate hydrogen storage, and electric energy storage with lithium ion rechargeable batteries.

Hierarchical synthesis of non-centrosymmetric hybrid nanostructures and enabled plasmon-driven photocatalysis

“…This type of nc-HN offers an example to examine finely tailored synergistic effects and to reveal new role of plasmons in photocatalysis that has not been settled in the field because of the lack of material control and predictive modelling 9 . Nanoscale photocatalysis represents a promising route for harnessing an electromagnetic process to convert solar to chemical energies 11,[38][39][40] . A typical nanoscale photocatalytic system exclusively involves semiconductor nanostructures, in which photogenerated electron-hole pairs in semiconductors can be rapidly separated at semiconductor-catalyst interfaces to perform redox chemistry at the catalytically active sites 3,9,11,41,42 .…”

Photocatalytic Reduction of Aqueous Cr(VI) with CdS under Visible Light Irradiation: Effect of Particle Size

“…Photocatalytic transformation of reactants at the surface of a semiconductor is a complex multi-step process involving (a) photogeneration of conduction band electrons (ecb -) and valence band holes (hvb + ); (b) separation and transport of the charges to the photocatalysts surface; and (c) surface redox reaction [1]. The reductive and oxidative surface reactions involve the transfer (ejection) of electrons or holes to pre-adsorbed reactants.…”

Development of electrostatic supercapacitors by atomic layer deposition on nanoporous anodic aluminum oxides for energy harvesting applications

“…The outstanding properties exhibited by nanostructured materials are the key for the next generation of energy harvesting and storage devices. In order to accomplish with these objectives, the combination of patterned 3D nanostructures together with thin film deposition techniques are outstanding candidates to solve the high energy density storage problems, but without sacrifice the increasing power density requests [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. In particular, one of the most promising applications of nanomaterials for energy storage technologies is aimed to the fabrication of electrostatic supercapacitors (ESCs) by taking advantage of the huge specific surface area of nanostructured substrates like patterned templates combined with novel thin film deposition techniques to achieve high capacitance values.…”