Energy materials

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Energy materials are used for energy harvesting, storage, and conversion. [1] [2] Applications of energy materials include photovoltaics, as well as piezoelectronics. The study of energy materials is usually interdisciplinary, uniting materials scientists, chemists, physicists, biologists, and engineers.

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Solid-state chemistry, also sometimes referred as materials chemistry, is the study of the synthesis, structure, and properties of solid phase materials. It therefore has a strong overlap with solid-state physics, mineralogy, crystallography, ceramics, metallurgy, thermodynamics, materials science and electronics with a focus on the synthesis of novel materials and their characterization. A diverse range of synthetic techniques, such as the ceramic method and chemical vapour depostion, make solid-state materials. Solids can be classified as crystalline or amorphous on basis of the nature of order present in the arrangement of their constituent particles. Their elemental compositions, microstructures, and physical properties can be characterized through a variety of analytical methods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Chemical Society</span> American scientific society

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all degree levels and in all fields of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related fields. It is one of the world's largest scientific societies by membership. The ACS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code. Its headquarters are located in Washington, D.C., and it has a large concentration of staff in Columbus, Ohio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Soft matter</span>

Soft matter or soft condensed matter is a subfield of condensed matter comprising a variety of physical systems that are deformed or structurally altered by thermal or mechanical stress of the magnitude of thermal fluctuations. These materials share an important common feature in that predominant physical behaviors occur at an energy scale comparable with room temperature thermal energy, and that entropy is considered the dominant factor. At these temperatures, quantum aspects are generally unimportant. Soft materials include liquids, colloids, polymers, foams, gels, granular materials, liquid crystals, flesh, and a number of biomaterials. When soft materials interact favorably with surfaces, they become squashed without an external compressive force. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who has been called the "founding father of soft matter," received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991 for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to the more complex cases found in soft matter, in particular, to the behaviors of liquid crystals and polymers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Alivisatos</span> American chemist and university administrator

Armand Paul Alivisatos is an American chemist and academic administrator who has served as the 14th president of the University of Chicago since September 2021. He is a pioneer in nanomaterials development and an authority on the fabrication of nanocrystals and their use in biomedical and renewable energy applications. He was ranked fifth among the world's top 100 chemists for the period 2000–2010 in the list released by Thomson Reuters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photosensitizer</span> Type of molecule reacting to light

Photosensitizers are light absorbers that alter the course of a photochemical reaction. They usually are catalysts. They can function by many mechanisms, sometimes they donate an electron to the substrate, sometimes they abstract a hydrogen atom from the substrate. At the end of this process, the photosensitizer returns to its ground state, where it remains chemically intact, poised to absorb more light. One branch of chemistry which frequently utilizes photosensitizers is polymer chemistry, using photosensitizers in reactions such as photopolymerization, photocrosslinking, and photodegradation. Photosensitizers are also used to generate prolonged excited electronic states in organic molecules with uses in photocatalysis, photon upconversion and photodynamic therapy. Generally, photosensitizers absorb electromagnetic radiation consisting of infrared radiation, visible light radiation, and ultraviolet radiation and transfer absorbed energy into neighboring molecules. This absorption of light is made possible by photosensitizers' large de-localized π-systems, which lowers the energy of HOMO and LUMO orbitals to promote photoexcitation. While many photosensitizers are organic or organometallic compounds, there are also examples of using semiconductor quantum dots as photosensitizers.

In materials science, polymorphism describes the existence of a solid material in more than one form or crystal structure. Polymorphism is a form of isomerism. Any crystalline material can exhibit the phenomenon. Allotropy refers to polymorphism for chemical elements. Polymorphism is of practical relevance to pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, pigments, dyestuffs, foods, and explosives. According to IUPAC, a polymorphic transition is "A reversible transition of a solid crystalline phase at a certain temperature and pressure to another phase of the same chemical composition with a different crystal structure." According to McCrone, polymorphs are "different in crystal structure but identical in the liquid or vapor states." Materials with two polymorphs are called dimorphic, with three polymorphs, trimorphic, etc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Menachem Elimelech</span> American engineer

Menachem Elimelech is the Sterling Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale University. Elimelech is the only professor from an engineering department at Yale to be awarded the Sterling professorship since its establishment in 1920. Elimelech moved from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to Yale University in 1998 and founded Yale's Environmental Engineering program.

Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) is a small-angle scattering technique by which nanoscale density differences in a sample can be quantified. This means that it can determine nanoparticle size distributions, resolve the size and shape of (monodisperse) macromolecules, determine pore sizes, characteristic distances of partially ordered materials, and much more. This is achieved by analyzing the elastic scattering behaviour of X-rays when travelling through the material, recording their scattering at small angles. It belongs to the family of small-angle scattering (SAS) techniques along with small-angle neutron scattering, and is typically done using hard X-rays with a wavelength of 0.07 – 0.2 nm. Depending on the angular range in which a clear scattering signal can be recorded, SAXS is capable of delivering structural information of dimensions between 1 and 100 nm, and of repeat distances in partially ordered systems of up to 150 nm. USAXS can resolve even larger dimensions, as the smaller the recorded angle, the larger the object dimensions that are probed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electrocatalyst</span> Catalyst participating in electrochemical reactions

An electrocatalyst is a catalyst that participates in electrochemical reactions. Electrocatalysts are a specific form of catalysts that function at electrode surfaces or, most commonly, may be the electrode surface itself. An electrocatalyst can be heterogeneous such as a platinized electrode. Homogeneous electrocatalysts, which are soluble, assist in transferring electrons between the electrode and reactants, and/or facilitate an intermediate chemical transformation described by an overall half reaction. Major challenges in electrocatalysts focus on fuel cells.

A potassium-ion battery or K-ion battery is a type of battery and analogue to lithium-ion batteries, using potassium ions for charge transfer instead of lithium ions. It was invented by the Iranian/American chemist Ali Eftekhari in 2004.

Sodium-ion batteries (NIBs or SIBs) are several types of rechargeable batteries, which use sodium ions (Na+) as its charge carriers. In some cases, its working principle and cell construction are similar to those of lithium-ion battery (LIB) types, but it replaces lithium with sodium as the cathode material, which belongs to the same group in the periodic table as lithium and thus has similar chemical properties. In other cases, aqueous Na-ion batteries are quite different from Li-ion batteries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Younan Xia</span> Chinese-American nanomedicine researcher

Younan Xia is a Chinese-American chemist, materials scientist, and bioengineer. He is the Brock Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, with joint appointments in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry, the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timothy M. Swager</span> American Chemist and Materials Scientist

Timothy M. Swager is an American Scientist and the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is at the interface of chemistry and materials science, with specific interests in carbon nanomaterials, polymers, and liquid crystals. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors.

Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh is an Australian scientist involved in research in the fields of materials sciences, electronics, and transducers. He is best known for his works on two-dimensional semiconductors, ingestible sensors and liquid metals. He led his group to the invention of an ingestible chemical sensor: human gas sensing capsule.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Crabtree</span> American physicist (1944–2023)

George William Crabtree was an American physicist known for his highly cited research on superconducting materials and, since 2012, for his directorship of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) at Argonne National Laboratory.

Richard Dronskowski is a German chemist and physicist. He is a full professor at the RWTH Aachen University.

Tsutomu Miyasaka, is a Japanese engineer in electrochemistry best known for the inventor of perovskite solar cell.

The iodate fluorides are chemical compounds which contain both iodate and fluoride anions (IO3 and F). In these compounds fluorine is not bound to iodine as it is in fluoroiodates.

Lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide (LLZO, Li7La3Zr2O12) or lithium lanthanum zirconate is a lithium-stuffed garnet material that is under investigation for its use in solid-state electrolytes in lithium-based battery technologies. LLZO has a high ionic conductivity and chemical stability against lithium metal, giving it an advantage for use as an electrolyte in solid-state batteries.

Caesium sesquioxide is a chemical compound with the formula Cs2O3 or Cs4O6. In terms of oxidation states, Caesium in this compound has a nominal charge of +1, and the oxygen is a mixed peroxide and superoxide for a structural formula of (Cs+)4(O−2)2(O2−2). Compared to the other caesium oxides, this phase is less well studied, but has been long present in the literature. It can be created by thermal decomposition of caesium superoxide at 290 °C.

References

  1. "Overview". Advanced Energy Materials. Wiley Online Library. Wiley-VCH. doi:10.1002/(ISSN)1614-6840 . Retrieved 2023-07-13.
  2. "About the Journal". ACS Applied Energy Materials. ACS Publications. American Chemical Society. ISSN   2574-0962 . Retrieved 2023-07-13.