EES Blog

HOT EES Communication

Solid oxide fuel cells have the potential to be used to generate energy from hydrocarbon fuels. However, they currently require very high operating temperatures, for example to allow oxygen reduction at the SOFC cathode to take place.

Designing a catalyst which can allow this reaction to proceed at much lower temperature is a key goal of SOFC research. Now Dane Morgan and co-workers have identified parameters – the bulk oxygen p-band or the bulk
oxygen vacancy formation energy – which are key to the activity of such catalysts.

They suggest that these descriptors could be used to design SOFCs with optimised properties in the future.

Read this exciting Energy and Environmental Science research:

Prediction of solid oxide fuel cell cathode activity with first-principles descriptors
Yueh-Lin Lee, Jesper Kleis, Jan Rossmeisl, Yang Shao-Horn and Dane Morgan
Energy Environ. Sci., 2011
DOI: 10.1039/C1EE02032C

In order to carry out water splitting using solar energy, the materials used should absorb visible light and have appropriate conduction band levels to allow the  production of H₂.

Abe and coworkers have made TaON and Ta₃N₅ photoanodes displaying high photocurrent which represent an exciting step towards this goal.

Read the Energy and Environmental Science paper at:

Fabrication of efficient TaON and Ta₃N₅ photoanodes for water splitting under visible light irradiation
Masanobu Higashi, Kazunari Domen and Ryu Abe
Energy Environ. Sci., 2011
DOI: 10.1039/C1EE01878G

Dye sensitized solar cells have been widely used to capture sunlight for energy applications. Wang, Koumoto et al. now report a hybrid device which collects both the light and heat from the sun.

The overall cell is able to achieve a high conversion efficiency of 13.8%, and the authors say that it has not yet been fully optimised.

Read this exciting research at:

A novel high-performance photovoltaic–thermoelectric hybrid device
Ning Wang, Li Han, Hongcai He, Nam-Hee Park and Kunihito Koumoto
Energy Environ. Sci., 2011
DOI: 10.1039/C1EE01646F

Sodium-ion batteries could represent a cheaper alternative to lithium-ion batteries if their properties were suitable. Ceder et al. have investigated the difference between Na-ion and Li-ion based intercalation chemistries in terms of three key battery properties—voltage, phase stability and diffusion barriers. Their findings indicate that Na-ion systems can be competitive with Li-ion systems.

Read the Energy and Environmental Science article:

Voltage, stability and diffusion barrier differences between sodium-ion and lithium-ion intercalation materials
Shyue Ping Ong, Vincent L. Chevrier, Geoffroy Hautier, Anubhav Jain, Charles Moore, Sangtae Kim, Xiaohua Ma and Gerbrand Ceder
Energy Environ. Sci., 2011, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C1EE01782A

Recently scientists have succeeded in making stretchable materials for capturing the huge amount of energy which is available from the sun. Such materials would have the advantage of being more hard wearing portable as well as being suitable for applications in which aerodynamics were important e.g. vehicles.

Read this Perspective feature review of recent developments in the field:

Stretchable, elastic materials and devices for solar energy conversion
Darren J. Lipomi and Zhenan Bao
Energy Environ. Sci., 2011, DOI: 10.1039/C1EE01881G
http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/C1EE01881G