Nature‐Inspired Electrochemical Energy‐Storage Materials and Devices

Abstract

Nature-inspired strategies have been proposed recently as novel and effective routines to address these challenges.(1) Specifically, the limited availability of mineral resources could hardly satisfy the booming requirement and subsequent production quantity of energystorage devices for long time, and will necessarily lead to their increasing price. [15,16] Moreover, the non-biodegradability of current energy-storage devices after their service lifetime will bring about tremendous electronic garbage. Thus, renewable, cheap and environment-friendly energy-storage related materials are greatly desired to substitute current components. [12,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] In nature, its energy conversion and storage systems have been evolved for billions of years, and spawned highly efficient and well suited cellular respiration machineries in living organisms for external energy assimilation, metabolism and distribution. [27] In recent years, inspirations have been taken from nature to fabricate biomolecule-based electrode materials from renewable biomass. [28][29][30][31][32] For example, inspired by the electron shuttles functioning in extracellular electron transfer via reversible redox-cycling, man-made electrode materials with similar active functional groups have been explored. [33,34] In our newly reported work, supercapacitor employing redoxactive biomolecule as the faradic-type active material could even obtain a higher energy density than those of previous transition-metal-based supercapacitors. [35] (2) Another issue encountered by current energy-storage system arises from the laborious preparation processes of their energy-storage materials which usually adopt extreme conditions. In biological systems, assembly of complicated micro-organelles are precisely controlled with the aid of biotemplates. By mimicking the bio-assembly processes or utilizing appropriate biotemplates, facile preparation of energy-storage materials in mild conditions has been achieved. [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] (3) In rechargeable batteries and supercapacitors, the architecture of active materials always determines their cycle life and rate performance. [45][46][47][48] While the abundant examples of natural structures with known stableness, geometry configuration, surface wettability and mechanical property provide clues for rational design of nanostructured active materials with desired performance. [49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63] (4) What's more, nature-inspired routines are also useful for rational design of ideal binders Currently, tremendous efforts are being devoted to develop high-performance electrochemical energy-storage materials and devices. Conventional electrochemical energy-storage systems are confronted with great challenges to achieve high energy density, long cycle-life, excellent biocompatibility and environmental friendliness. The biological energy metabolism and storage systems have appealing merits of high efficiency, sophisticated regulation, clean and renewabil...

Flexible, Stretchable, and Transparent Planar Microsupercapacitors Based on 3D Porous Laser‐Induced Graphene

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6] Some of the most effective and practical technologies for electrochemical energy conversion and storage are batteries, fuel cells, and supercapacitors. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] Among them, supercapacitors (SCs) have attracted intensive attentions due to their high power density and long lifecycle. [9,13,[16][17][18] The energy storage is performed by ion adsorption or fast surface redox reaction at the interface between electrodes and electrolyte.…”

Strategies for Building Robust Traffic Networks in Advanced Energy Storage Devices: A Focus on Composite Electrodes

“…Lastly, repairing the broken ETN by self‐healing chemistry represents another attractive strategy for developing structural binder that can realize robust ETN in composite electrodes. This strategy was initially proposed by Cui and co‐workers, and it is attracting notable attention for the studies on Si‐anode . The self‐healing polymers usually have multiple intermolecular or intramolecular H‐bonding sites which can repair the cracks induced by the volume change of AMs.…”

Sustainable Separators for High‐Performance Lithium Ion Batteries Enabled by Chemical Modifications

“…To address the aforementioned issues of polyolefin‐based separators, natural polymer nanofiber–based separators have received intensive attention due to their good electrolyte wettability, low cost, high thermal stabilities, and excellent mechanical strength . The natural polymer materials are naturally abundant, biocompatible, biodegradable, and renewable on the earth, which are very attractive for the sustainable development of energy storage systems . However, the rich hydroxyl groups on the surface of natural polymer nanofibers lead to the formation of dense and nonporous films due to the intensive hydrogen bonding of the hydroxyl groups among nanofibers, which results in low Li + ion transport in the separators.…”