Engineering of organic-inorganic nanohybrids for energy storage and energy conversion applications

Abstract

The dramatically increasing growth of technology in widespread sectors, including industrial, pharmaceutical, and agricultural sectors, triggers energy consumption at a high level.[1,2] Till now, the combustion of conventional fossil fuels including coal and oil accounts for fulfilling global energy demand. However, the combustion of nonrenewable fossil fuels leads to emission of hazardous gases such as CO2, SO2 and CO in the environment, which leads to several environmental and health issues.[3] The use of renewable energy sources such as solar energy and wind energy has attracted a great deal of interest in fulfilling global energy demand in an environmentally friendly way.[4] However, fulfilling the continuous energy supply from renewable energy sources requires efficient energy conversion and energy storage system.[5] From the past few decades, several methods and technologies were developed and implemented for efficient energy conversion and storage.[6,7] Solar cell allows conversion of solar energy to electricity; 8 however, photochemical fuel production allows conversion of solar energy in chemical energy in the form of chemical bond of small molecules such as H2 and CH4. [9,10] Among the developed energy conversion and storage technology, electrochemical conversion of energy and electrochemical energy storage are emerging as efficient methods for energy utilization and storage. [11] Several electrochemical energy conversion systems such as fuel cells and electrolyzers with electrochemical energy storage systems such as supercapacitors and rechargeable batteries have been extensively explored to obtain higher energy conversion and storage efficiency. [12,13,14,15] Multifunctional novel electrode materials with high performance play a pivotal role to obtain higher energy efficiency and energy storage densities. The development of higher power and energy density electrochemical energy storage design and engineering of novel materials is one of the most important tasks. The control over micro and nanoscale architectures for the effective ions or electron transportation at electrode-electrolyte interface plays important role in electrochemical processes. The self-assembly of active electrode material through van der Waals interactions hydrogen bonding and electrostatic interactions into the micro- and nanoscale architectures offers ion transportation channels and active sites for electrochemical applications.