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High-performance polymer electrolytes are highly sought after in the development of solid-state batteries. Lynden Archer and co-workers report an in situ polymerization of liquid electrolytes in a lithium battery for creating promising polymer electrolytes with high ionic conductivity and low interfacial resistance.
Effects from electrolytes on supercapacitor electrodes, especially pseudocapacitive materials, are important but often overlooked. Gogotsi and colleagues demonstrate strong influences from electrolyte solvents on charge-storage processes in a titanium carbide and identify a best-performing electrode/electrolyte couple for supercapacitors.
Maintaining a pH gradient across a fuel cell improves device efficiency and flexibility in device chemistry. Here the authors develop an efficient microscale bipolar interface for direct borohydride fuel cells, enabling sustained operations with a pH differential between the anolyte and the catholyte.
Hydrogen fuel, produced from renewable power, could be critical in the decarbonization of the electricity and transportation sectors. Here, a thorough economic analysis shows that hydrogen obtained from wind power is already cost competitive in niche applications and may become widely competitive in the foreseeable future.
Metal-based smart windows allow for light and heat transmission control but suffer from poor metal ion diffusion over large areas. Here, the authors demonstrate a 100 cm2 window that is uniformly switchable from clear to black in 60 s by combining reversible metal electrodeposition with ion insertion.
The growing deployment of solar panels in urban areas requires tools to determine their optimal placement and electricity yield. Towards this end, this study presents a simplified model based on the sky view and sun coverage factors and validates it using real-world data from different systems in different climates.
Carrier recombination limits the power conversion efficiency of perovskite solar cells. Here the authors construct a planar p–n homojunction perovskite solar cell to promote the oriented transport of carriers and reduce recombination, thus enabling power conversion efficiency of 21.3%.
This Article presents a battery with protons as the charge carrier, as opposed to Li-ion batteries, which rely on the transport of Li-ions. Protons are conducted by means of the Grotthuss mechanism in a hydrated Prussian blue analogue electrode, offering potential for ultrafast rate and long-life batteries.
Blockchain-based distributed management of electricity systems is an important step towards making these systems more resilient. Although there are many implementations, here the researchers formalize a basic template for smart contracts that can be built upon for distributed electricity systems management.
Luminescent solar concentrators are promising for semi-transparent, building-integrated photovoltaic systems. Here the authors minimize the absorption losses by relying on fast energy transfer in multiphase perovskite nanoplatelets to achieve optical quantum efficiency of 26% on 100 cm2 devices.
Compressed-air energy storage could be a useful inter-seasonal storage resource to support highly renewable power systems. This study presents a modelling approach to assess the potential for such storage in porous rocks and, applying it to the UK, finds availability of up to 96 TWh in offshore saline aquifers.
Despite its importance in lithium batteries, the mechanism of Li dendrite growth is not well understood. Here the authors study three representative solid electrolytes with neutron depth profiling and identify high electronic conductivity as the root cause for the dendrite issue.
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are increasingly being explored as electrocatalysts for the oxygen evolution and reduction reactions, which are important processes in electrolysers and fuel cells. Here, the authors increase the activity of MOFs for these reactions by introducing strain into the lattice using UV light illumination.