Themed collection 2015 most accessed Energy & Environmental Science articles

Capacitive deionization (CDI) is a promising technology for water desalination that has seen tremendous advances over the past five years.

Ferroelectric materials offer opportunities for unconventional solar energy conversion.

Graphene-based materials have shown great potential in various fields across physics, chemistry, biology, and electronics, due to their unique electronic properties, facile synthesis, and ease of functionalization.

This review is specifically focused on the progress in the cathodes for non-aqueous Li–air batteries in the terms of the materials, structure and fabrication.

This review presents a summary of recent progress and strategies in fabricating MOF-based nanostructures for electrochemical applications.

The rational design of non-precious transition metal perovskite oxide catalysts holds exceptional promise for understanding and mastering the kinetics of oxygen electrocatalysis instrumental to artificial photosynthesis, solar fuels, fuel cells, electrolyzers, and metal–air batteries.

The latest developments in solution-processed interfacial layers for polymer and hybrid perovskite solar cells are comprehensively reviewed in this article.

We summarise current state-of-the-art efficient visible-light driven heterojunction water splitting photo(electro)catalysts and describe how theoretical modelling of electronic structures at interfaces can explain their functionality.

This review summarizes the recent advancements in the synthesis and applications of graphene materials for flexible graphene devices related to energy conversion and storage.

A review of supercapacitor electrode materials with 0, 1, 2, and 3 dimensional nanostructures.

The room temperature Na-ion secondary battery has been under focus lately due to its feasibility to compete against the already well-established Li-ion secondary battery.

Storing electrical energy in hydrogen requires less manufacturing energy than batteries, per unit of energy dispatched over the system's lifetime.

Planar perovskite solar cells exhibit a conduction band misalignment of the perovskite with TiO₂, but not with SnO₂. The system using the latter yielded power conversion efficiencies over 18%.

Photocatalytic overall water splitting on TiO₂-based photocatalysts is determined by both thermodynamics and kinetics simultaneously.

Compact TiO₂ is replaced by a low-temperature solution-processed TiO_X/60-PCBM layer for electron extraction in perovskite solar cells with high steady conversion efficiencies.

Ni₂P is a bifunctional catalyst for both hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions.

Non-fullerene organic solar cells with power conversion efficiencies of up to 6.3% are reported using properly matched donor and acceptor.

A dual nature of the excited state of CH₃NH₃PbI₃ perovskites is discovered, which fully identifies the spectral features in transient spectroscopy.

The inverted CH₃NH₃PbI₃ cell fabricated using a two-step method with H₂O as an additive in a PbI₂ solution exhibited an extremely high FF of 85%.

A hybrid structure constructed by uniformly anchoring crystalline Ni₂P cocatalyst on 1D CdS nanorods exhibits extraordinarily efficient photocatalytic activity for H₂ evolution in water (rate of 1,200 μmol h⁻¹ mg⁻¹ and TOF of 36,400 h⁻¹ per mol Ni₂P) under visible light irradiation.

The inverted CH₃NH₃PbI₃ planar hybrid solar cells exhibited better device efficiency and stability and lower hysteresis than the normal cells.

Ionic displacement modifying the electric field in the device is found as most likely reason for the hysteresis which is examined by separating fast and slow processes and comparing devices with and without blocking layer.

Semi-transparent perovskite solar cells with silver nanowires are stacked on CIGS and Si to achieve solid-state polycrystalline tandems with efficiency improvement.

We report annealing-free compact TiO_x layer by atomic layer deposition for high efficiency flexible perovskite solar cells, and maintained 95% of the initial PCE after 1000 bending cycles with 10 mm bending radius.

A hybrid interfacial layer of ultrathin NiO/meso-Al₂O₃ with minimal optical/recombination losses, leads to solid performance improvement of inverted perovskite solar cells.

Thorough measurements of the optical constants of CH₃NH₃PbI₃ are used to determine the limiting parasitic losses in solar cells revealing up to 100% IQE and excellent performance at oblique incidence.

MOF-derived Co@Co₃O₄@C core@bishell nanoparticles encapsulated into a highly ordered porous carbon matrix show very high catalytic activity and stability toward the oxygen reduction reaction.

New Pt–Ni catalysts were made for PEMFCs with previously unachieved ORR activity and device durability that exceed the DOE 2017 targets for commercialization.

A novel one-pot catalytic approach is presented that is able to directly transform cellulose into straight-chain alkanes (mainly n-hexane).