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EditorialNanomaterials for Electrochemical Energy Conversion
andStorage Technologies
Suresh Kannan Balasingam ,1 Karthick Sivalingam Nallathambi
,2
Mohammed Hussain Abdul Jabbar ,3 Ananthakumar Ramadoss ,4
Sathish Kumar Kamaraj ,5 and Manab Kundu 6
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Norwegian
University of Science and Technology (NTNU),Trondheim 7491,
Norway2Electrochemical Materials and Devices Lab, Department of
Chemistry, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore 641046,
India3Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University
of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20740, USA4Laboratory for
Advanced Research in Polymeric Materials (LARPM), Central Institute
of Plastic Engineering andTechnology (CIPET), Bhubaneshwar 751024,
India5Laboratory of the Sustainable Environment, Technological
Institute of El Llano Aguascalientes (ITEL)/National
TechnologicalInstitute of Mexico (TecNM), Aguascalientes C.P.
20330, Mexico6Department of Chemistry, SRM Institute of Science and
Technology, Chennai 603203, India
Correspondence should be addressed to Suresh Kannan Balasingam;
[email protected]
Received 20 December 2018; Accepted 20 December 2018; Published
11 April 2019
Copyright © 2019 Suresh Kannan Balasingam et al. This is an open
access article distributed under the Creative CommonsAttribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original workis properly
cited.
In this modern era, our society faces a serious energy crisisdue
to increasing human population. Energy consumptionstarts from
small-scale electronic gadgets to high power con-suming electric
vehicles. To supply power on demand,researchers focus on
alternative renewable energy resourcesincluding solar energy, wind
energy, hydropower, geother-mal energy, and bioenergy. Effectively,
energy conversionand storage technologies such as solar cells, fuel
cells, second-ary batteries, supercapacitors, and other
self-powered sys-tems are under rigorous investigation. The
efficient energyconversion and storage performance of those
technologiesrely on material properties of their electrode,
electrolyte,and other device components. It is recently known
thatnanostructuring of device components leads to
enhancedefficiency in terms of robustness and reliability of the
energyconversion and storage systems. Moreover, the nanostruc-tured
materials have attracted great interest due to theirunique
physicochemical and electrochemical properties.Hence, the
utilization of such materials in nanodimensionswill create enormous
impact on the efficiency of various
energy conversion and storage devices. The main objectiveof this
special issues is to identify the significant researchparadigms of
nanomaterials and their potential impacts onapplications. In
particular, focus of this issue is on the syn-thesis and
characterization of nanostructured materials forvarious
applications such as supercapacitors,
batteries,photoelectrochemical, and thermal enhancement
systems.
The highlights of the published articles are summarizedas
follows. In this special issue, Y. Yuan et al. synthesizedthe
porous activated carbon materials from Pleurotuseryngii-based
biomass material via carbonization, followedby KOH activation and
utilized it for supercapacitor appli-cations. The as-prepared
activated carbon presented a largespecific area with high porosity
which exhibited a maximumspecific capacitance of 195 F g-1 with 93%
capacitance reten-tion after 15000 cycles. It is known that
Pleurotus eryngii isone of the readily available sources of carbon
materials,potentially suitable for supercapacitor applications.
Also, thisbiomass can be the resource for development of porous
acti-vated carbon for other energy conversion and storage
devices
HindawiJournal of NanomaterialsVolume 2019, Article ID 1089842,
2 pageshttps://doi.org/10.1155/2019/1089842
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3774-4209http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6765-8649http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3922-7988http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6616-7693http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5145-6962http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5707-3118https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/1089842
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in the future. Further, B.-X. Zou et al. synthesized
hierarchi-cal porous N, O-doped carbon composites by combining
lowmolecular weight phenol resin and silk fibers in various
com-binations using a hydrothermal method and carbonizationprocess.
The as-prepared electroactive materials showed alow resistance and
good surface area with hierarchical poros-ity. The low molecular
phenol resin and silk fiber combina-tion increases the surface area
and enhanced the electrontransport within the active materials. The
fabricated symmet-ric device delivered a maximum energy density of
7.4Whkg-1 and power density of 90.1W kg−1 using
aqueouselectrolyte.
L. T. N. Huynh et al. prepared the LiFePO4@carbon com-posite
material by hydrothermal method followed by thermaltreatment for
lithium-ion battery application. The differentcalcination processes
did not affect the olivine structure;however, the surface
morphology, the quality of carbon coat-ing, and the electrochemical
properties were significantlychanged. The sample annealed at 700°C
showed a good spe-cific capacity of 170mAh g-1 and the decent
cyclic stability upto 120 cycles due to an optimum amount of carbon
coatingover olivine material. In another lithium-ion battery
article,P. M. Nogales et al. developed a new method to estimatethe
ageing evaluation of Li-ion batteries in a shorter time.The authors
present the numerical analysis method usingcolumbic efficiency and
capacity loss rate that could deter-mine the cyclic stability of
electrode material within a shorterevaluation time.
Y. Liu and coworkers investigated the effect of surfacedefects
density of zinc oxide films on the photoelectrochem-ical water
splitting reaction. The surface defect density of zincoxide
photoanodes was tuned by annealing the electrodes atvarious
temperatures. The surface photovoltage of ZnOfilms was obtained by
Kelvin probe force microscopy. Thesample annealed at 450°C showed
minimum surface photo-voltage, which confirmed that the low surface
defect densitysample showed enhancement in photoelectrochemical
wateroxidation. The applied bias photon-to-current efficiency
ofannealed ZnO photoanode reached to 0.237%, about 7.4times higher
than that of unannealed ZnO photoanode. Thiswork provided a
potential method to design innovativephotoanodes for
photoelectrochemical water splitting.
S. Razvarz et al. performed the experimental research onthermal
enhancement related to the heat pipe (with Al2O3nanopowder) at
different title angle. The important observa-tion is the increase
in heat transfer coefficient with theincreasing heat flux of the
evaporator. While adding Al2O3nanoparticles to pure water, the
thermal efficiency of the heatpipe enhanced considerably.
Optimizing the quantity of theAl2O3 nanopowder assists in thermal
efficiency enhance-ment. Also, the heat pipe thermal efficiency
enhanced withincreasing nanoparticle concentrations and tilt
angles.
Conflicts of Interest
We declare that there is no conflict of interests or
privateagreement with companies regarding our work for thisspecial
issue. We have no financial relationship through
employment, consultancies, and either stock ownership
orhonoraria with industry.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the contributed authors andreferees
of this special issue, also grateful to the editorialboard for the
smoother process flow and rapid publication.The lead editor would
like to thank all the editors for theirtime spent in reviewing and
assigning reviewers for the sub-mitted manuscripts.
Suresh Kannan BalasingamKarthick Sivalingam Nallathambi
Mohammed Hussain Abdul JabbarAnanthakumar RamadossSathish Kumar
Kamaraj
Manab Kundu
2 Journal of Nanomaterials
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