EES Blog

This week’s HOT articles

31 Mar 2014

By Katherine Dunn, Publishing Assistant.

Take a look at this week’s selection! These articles are available free for a limited time: Graphical abstract: Designing the next generation high capacity battery electrodes

Investigating charge dynamics in halide perovskite-sensitized mesostructured solar cells
V. Roiati, S. Colella, G. Lerario, L. De Marco, A. Rizzo, A. Listorti and G. Gigli
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43991G, Communication

Microfluidic fuel cells on paper: meeting the power needs of next generation lateral flow devices
J. P. Esquivel, F. J. Del Campo, J. L. Gómez de la Fuente, S. Rojas and N. Sabaté
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE44044C, Paper

Designing the next generation high capacity battery electrodes
H.-C. Yu, C. Ling, J. Bhattacharya, J. C. Thomas, K. Thornton and A. Van der Ven
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43154A, Paper

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This week’s HOT articles

24 Mar 2014

By Katherine Dunn, Publishing Assistant.

Take a look at this week’s selection! These articles are available free for a limited time: Graphical abstract: Doping high-surface-area mesoporous TiO2 microspheres with carbonate for visible light hydrogen production

Colossal pseudocapacitance in a high functionality–high surface area carbon anode doubles the energy of an asymmetric supercapacitor
Zhi Li, Zhanwei Xu, Huanlei Wang, Jia Ding, Beniamin Zahiri, Chris M. B. Holt, Xuehai Tan and David Mitlin
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43979H, Paper

A multiple ion-exchange membrane design for redox flow batteries
Shuang Gu, Ke Gong, Emily Z. Yan and Yushan Yan
DOI: 10.1039/C4EE00165F, Paper

Doping high-surface-area mesoporous TiO2 microspheres with carbonate for visible light hydrogen production
Bin Liu, Li-Min Liu, Xiu-Feng Lang, Hsin-Yi Wang, Xiong Wen (David) Lou and Eray S. Aydil
DOI: 10.1039/C4EE00472H, Communication

Pseudocapacitive oxide materials for high-rate electrochemical energy storage
Veronica Augustyn, Patrice Simon and Bruce Dunn
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE44164D, Review Article

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Microfluidic fuel cells on paper

19 Mar 2014

By Katherine Dunn, Publishing Assistant.

Jennifer Newton writes about a HOT EES article in Chemistry World

Instrument-free point-of-care diagnostic devices could be taken to the next level with the development of microfluidic fuel cells on paper.

Paper is cheap, biodegradable, thin and flexible, making it an ideal base material for single-use tests. The paper-based microfluidic fuel cells created by Juan Pablo Esquivel, at the Barcelona Microelectronics Institute of the National Microelectronics Centre, IMB-CNM (CSIC), in Spain, and colleagues, were inspired by the convenience and simplicity of lateral flow test strips – pregnancy tests are probably the most well-known example of these – and take advantage of capillary diffusion to transport reactants without external pumps.

Interested to know more? Read the full news article by Jennifer Newton on Chemistry World here…

Read the original article in EES – it’s open access

Microfluidic fuel cells on paper: meeting the power needs of next generation lateral flow devices
Juan Pablo Esquivel Bojorquez, Javier Del Campo, de la Fuente José Luis, Sergio Rojas and Neus Sabaté
Energy Environ. Sci., 2014, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE44044C, Paper

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EES Issue 3 of 2014 out now!

19 Mar 2014

By Katherine Dunn, Publishing Assistant.

Graphical abstract: Front cover The latest issue of EES is now online. You can read the full issue here.

The outside front cover features the paper Optical designs that improve the efficiency of Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 solar cells by Mark T. Winkler, Wei Wang, Oki Gunawan, Harold J. Hovel, Teodor K. Todorov and David B. Mitzi.

Visible light driven photocatalysis mediated via ligand-to-metal charge transfer (LMCT): an alternative approach to solar activation of titania is the paper highlighted on the inside front cover by Guan Zhang, Gonu Kim and Wonyong Choi.

Issue 3 contains a number of excellent Opinion, Analysis, Review, and Perspective articles:

Solar energy: setting the economic bar from the top-down
E. W. McFarland

Large scale deployment of polymer solar cells on land, on sea and in the air
Nieves Espinosa, Markus Hösel, Mikkel Jørgensen and Frederik C. Krebs

Capacitive energy storage in micro-scale devices: recent advances in design and fabrication of micro-supercapacitors
Majid Beidaghi and Yury Gogotsi

Spin caloritronics
Stephen R. Boona, Roberto C. Myers and Joseph P. Heremans Graphical abstract: Inside front cover

Towards sustainable wastewater treatment by using microbial fuel cells-centered technologies
Wen-Wei Li, Han-Qing Yu and Zhen He

From lab to fab: how must the polymer solar cell materials design change? – an industrial perspective
Riccardo Po, Andrea Bernardi, Anna Calabrese, Chiara Carbonera, Gianni Corso and Andrea Pellegrino

Interfacial reactions in ceramic membrane reactors for syngas production
A. S. Yu, J. M. Vohs and R. J. Gorte

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This week’s HOT articles

11 Mar 2014

By Katherine Dunn, Publishing Assistant.

Take a look at this week’s selection! These articles are available free for a limited time: Graphical abstract: Na0.67Mn1−xMgxO2 (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.2): a high capacity cathode for sodium-ion batteries

Na0.67Mn1−xMgxO2 (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.2): a high capacity cathode for sodium-ion batteries
Juliette Billaud, Gurpreet Singh, A. Robert Armstrong, Elena Gonzalo, Vladimir Roddatis, Michel Armand, Teófilo Rojo and Peter G. Bruce
DOI: 10.1039/C4EE00465E, Communication

Energy storage applications of activated carbons: supercapacitors and hydrogen storage
Marta Sevilla and Robert Mokaya
Energy Environ. Sci., 2014, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43525C, Review Article

Novel “3-D spacer” all fibre piezoelectric textiles for energy harvesting applications
Navneet Soin, Tahir H. Shah, Subhash C. Anand, Junfeng Geng, Wiwat Pornwannachai, Pranab Mandal, David Reid, Surbhi Sharma, Ravi L. Hadimani, Derman Vatansever Bayramol and Elias Siores
Energy Environ. Sci., 2014, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43987A, Paper

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Revealing electron transfer in current-producing bacteria

05 Mar 2014

By Heather Montgomery, Deputy Editor.

Bhavin Siritanaratkul is a guest web-writer for EES. Bhavin is a PhD student in Inorganic Chemistry at Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Fraser Armstrong. In his spare time, he enjoys playing the piano and reading science fiction.

Researchers from Japan and the USA have found the first clue to the electron transfer mechanism in a species of current-producing bacteria.

Some bacteria can generate electrical energy from its metabolic systems, and they are used in microbial fuel cells and bioremediation processes. Geobacter sulfurreducens is the most efficient current-producing bacteria found so far, but there is no conclusive mechanism for electron transfer from the bacteria to the electrode.

In this paper, Ryuhei Nakamura et al. the authors identify self-secreted flavin as the electron shuttle involved in this extracellular electron transfer (EET). For this bacteria, free-floating flavin in the solution does not contribute to EET, as changing the solution to a fresh one did not impact current production. Instead, electron transfer occurs through flavin bound to c-type cytochromes (c-Cyts) on the outer membrane.

The authors confirmed flavin secretion by spectroscopy and mass chromatography, and voltammetry showed that current production was influenced by the amount of flavin present. The importance of c-Cyts was revealed by a mutant comparison experiment, in which a mutant lacking several major c-Cyts produced less current than the wild type.

Extracellular electron transfer (EET) is a key step in current production from bacteria, and understanding the mechanisms involved can lead to optimization of microbial fuel cells.

by Bhavin Siritanaratkul

For more information read this Energy & Environmental Science article:

Uptake of self-secreted flavins as bound cofactors for extracellular electron transfer in Geobacter species
Akihiro Okamoto, Koichiro Saito, Kengo Inoue, Kenneth H. Nealson, Kazuhito Hashimoto and Ryuhei Nakamura
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43674H

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A Neutral Solution: Reliable PEC H2 Production at Near Neutral pH

26 Feb 2014

By Paige Johnson.

In an exciting breakthrough in photoelectrochemical (PEC) solar generator development, a new report describes a methodology for robust H₂production in a near neutral environment.

Robust production of purified H2 in a stable, self-regulating, and continuously operating solar fuel generator

The development of practical, sustainable solar fuel generators comes with many challenges. Not only do the materials and components used need to be cost-effective and abundant, but the devices also need to be able to consistently produce purified fuels over long periods of time under environmentally benign conditions. A challenge to meeting all of these requirements has been in the creation of devices that are stable using either strong acid or basic electrolytes. A recent EES paper by Modestino et al. describes the development of a controlled recirculating stream across reactions sites to yield continuous solar-hydrogen generation in near neutral pH electrolytes.

In this report, researchers from the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis and collaborating institutions describe alternate ion transport pathways that allow for operation under a near neutral pH. By creating a recirculation scheme to balance the concentration across the membrane in a membrane-separated photoelectrochemical (PEC) system, the authors achieved robust production of separated product streams (pure hydrogen and oxygen) via their ion-transport membrane components.

Designing a PEC device that operates using neutral pH electrolytes enables the use of catalytic and light absorbing components that would degrade in acidic or basic environments. The methodology described in this paper can provide researchers with a platform to experiment with different materials and hopefully optimize solar-to-hydrogen efficiency. It will be interesting to see the implementation of this methodology in future research, and if this approach ultimately provides a good solution to one major obstacle in the creation of scalable, sustainable, and robust solar fuel generators.

Read more in the full EES article here:

Robust production of purified H₂ in a stable, self-regulating, and continuously operating solar fuel generator
Miguel A. Modestino, Karl A. Walczak, Alan Berger, Christopher M. Evans, Sophia Haussener, Carl Koval, John S. Newman, Joel W. Ager and Rachel A. Segalman
Energy Environ. Sci., 2014,7, 297-301
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43214A

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This week’s HOT articles

17 Feb 2014

By Katherine Dunn, Publishing Assistant.

Take a look at this week’s selection! These articles are available free for a limited time: Graphical abstract: Uptake of self-secreted flavins as bound cofactors for extracellular electron transfer in Geobacter species

Transforming an oxygen-tolerant [NiFe] uptake hydrogenase into a proficient, reversible hydrogen producer
Bonnie J. Murphy, Frank Sargent and Fraser A. Armstrong
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43652G, Paper

Uptake of self-secreted flavins as bound cofactors for extracellular electron transfer in Geobacter species
Akihiro Okamoto, Koichiro Saito, Kengo Inoue, Kenneth H. Nealson, Kazuhito Hashimoto and Ryuhei Nakamura
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43674H, Communication

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Putting the power in power-dressing – EES article in Chemistry World

11 Feb 2014

By Katherine Dunn, Publishing Assistant.

Scientists in the UK developing wearable electronics have knitted a flexible fabric that delivers twice the power output of current energy harvesting textiles.

There is considerable interest and research into wearable piezoelectric energy harvesters that use waste energy from human movement or the ambient environment to power low-energy consuming wearable devices, such as wireless sensors and consumer electronics. Typically these materials are ceramic-based with limited flexibility, so aren’t that comfortable to wear, and include toxic elements like lead. They also involve charge-collecting metallic electrodes with poor fatigue resistance that fail after repeated use. New, less rigid materials with sufficient mechanical strength and an all-in-one design are therefore highly sought after.

The polymeric piezoelectric fibres created by Navneet Soin at the University of Bolton and colleagues in the laboratory of Elias Siores fulfill all of the above: they are flexible, strong and breathable.

Interested to know more? Read the full news article by Polly Wilson on Chemistry World here…

Read the article by N Soin et al. in EES:

Novel “3-D spacer” all fibre piezoelectric textiles for energy harvesting applications
Navneet Soin, Tahir Shah, Subhash Anand, Junfeng Geng, Wiwat Pornwannachai, Pranab Mandal, David Reid, Surbhi Sharma, Ravi Hadimani, Derman Vatansever Bayramol and Elias Siores
Energy Environ. Sci., 2014, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE43987A, Paper

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This week’s HOT articles

This week’s HOT articles

Microfluidic fuel cells on paper

EES Issue 3 of 2014 out now!

This week’s HOT articles

Revealing electron transfer in current-producing bacteria

A Neutral Solution: Reliable PEC H2 Production at Near Neutral pH

This week’s HOT articles

Top 10 most-read EES articles – Q4 2013

Putting the power in power-dressing – EES article in Chemistry World

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