EES Blog

By using 3D printing researchers in the UK have cut the cost of manufacturing devices that produce hydrogen fuel by splitting water. The 3D printed plastic components developed by Lee Cronin and co-workers at the University of Glasgow, UK, allow for the construction of light weight and low-cost electrolysers that could make the currently expensive devices available to a wider audience. Hardware hackers in the scientific community are also encouraged to use the new manufacturing approach in open source developments.

Interested to find out more? For the full article visit Chemistry World.

Read the original article in Energy and Environmental Science – free to access until August 15th!

3D Printed Flow Plates for the Electrolysis of Water: an Economic and Adaptable Approach to Device Manufacture

A recent article in EES on how to increase the light-absorbing capability of a photoelectrochemical cell by arranging spheres of tungsten oxide has been selected as one of the three science articles featured in this week’s issue of The Economist. The article is written by Florent Boudoire and co-workers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, where the group’s research efforts are concentrated on high performance ceramic materials for energy and the environment.

The Economist offers authoritative insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science, technology and the connections between them.

Read the full article on the website now!

A new type of blue energy harvesting device may offer a practical method of continuous coastal electricity generation.

In 2011, Stanford researchers described a new form of energy harvesting device coined as a “mixing entropy battery” in Nano Letters¹. Their device capitalized on the chemical energy available in a system where an ion concentration gradient is present; in this case where low salinity wastewater or river water was mixed with ~0.6 M NaCl rich seawater. It is estimated that during this mixing process, there is a free energy reduction of 2.2 kJ per liter of freshwater.

Extractable energy depends on charging time

Activated carbons for energy storage

In this interesting and informative article, M. Sevilla and R. Mokaya review state-of-the-art synthesis methods for the preparation of activated carbons and their application in energy storage systems. Specifically, the authors detail recent developments in the control of properties such as pore size distribution, surface area and structural and chemical characteristics – and how such properties relate to performance in hydrogen storage and supercapacitors.

Activated carbons have a number of desirable features that make them attractive for use in advanced energy-storage systems. As well as being relatively light-weight, low-cost and chemically inert, they also have very large surface areas (> 1000 m²/g) and high micropore volumes in which to interact with other species. This makes activated carbons particularly useful as supercapacitor electrodes and hydrogen storage materials – where performance is strongly related to surface area and pore characteristics.

In this review, recent developments in the fabrication of activated carbons are discussed, focusing particularly on methods which allow the control of features, such as pore size distribution, surface area and physical and chemical characteristics such as texture, morphology and heteroatom-doping. The relationship between these properties and the performance of these materials as supercapacitor electrodes and their use in hydrogen storage is also looked at in detail, providing a guide for the direction of future research in this very active field.

Interested? Read the full article here:

Energy storage applications of activated carbons: supercapacitors and hydrogen storage

Marta Sevilla and Roberts Mokaya

Energy Environ. Sci., 2014, 7, 1250–1280