Advanced Materials for Green Chemistry and Renewable Energy

With the steady increase in the world's population and its demands for fuel and products, the global energy crisis has become one of the biggest challenges threatening the sustainable development of humanity today. Driven by the rapid depletion of fossil fuel resources and excessive carbon dioxide emission-induced global warming, research for clean and sustainable energy has seen explosive growth. To meet the growing demand for renewable energy, the Characteristic & Preponderant Discipline of Taishan Scholars “Ecological Chemical Process and Technology Team,” along with other institutes and universities around the world, committed to develop highly efficient renewable energy conversion and storage systems without damaging the environment. The future of renewable energy conversion and storage depends largely on the capabilities of engineering novel materials. This is because advanced materials with multiple functionalities could mitigate the drawbacks and improve the performances of emerging energy-production technologies, including fuel cells, solar energy conversion, supercapacitors, rechargeable batteries, hydrogen production, and storage. To guide the design of novel energy related materials, a fundamental understanding of their structure–property–performance relationship is necessary. Based on this understanding, we are thus able to develop methodologies for the fine control of the material structures, and manufacturing process of devices with enhanced efficiency and stability. This special issue highlights the advances in synthesis of various novel nanostructured materials, ranging from 0D quantum dots to 3D nanowire arrays, as well as their property investigations and applications in different fields, such as lithium-ion batteries, water splitting, fuel cells, photocatalysis, and electrocatalysis. It contains one Concept, two Reviews, four Communications and ten Full Papers, which provide a comprehensive overview of the most updated research developments of advanced materials for green chemistry and renewable energy, including work performed by colleagues from The University of New South Wales, The University of Queensland, Iowa State University, Nanyang Technological University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter-Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Institute of Process Engineering-CAS, Jilin University, and Qingdao University of Science and Technology. It is our honor to serve as the Guest Editors of this special issue. We would like to thank all the excellent work and support from the authors and referees. Meanwhile, our appreciation goes to the Small editorial team for their conscientious cooperation in the editorial process. Contributions from our colleagues at the Institute of Process Engineering-CAS, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, and other cooperated institutes and universities are also sincerely appreciated. To date, the achievements in advanced materials for renewable energy are exciting and the potential appears to be even greater. Despite the considerable progress, further efforts are required to meet the demands of practical technology. On the one hand, theoretical models, which can help understand the mechanisms and guide the fabrication of structures and devices, should be established; on the other hand, standard and reliable methods, which are applied to evaluate device efficiency, should be developed. Once these tasks are fulfilled, there is no doubt that the field will sustain its growth in the future. Dan Wang graduated from Jilin University in 1994. He entered a master's degree program at his alma mater in the same year. He obtained his Ph.D. from Yamanashi University in Japan in 2001. He conducted his postdoctoral research at Kochi University, Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth and Kyoto University, successively. He served as professor at the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS in 2004, and was selected as a leading talent of the “Taishan Scholars”. In recent years, he has mainly focused on the design and controllable synthesis of functional inorganic materials with porous or hollow structures, and their applications in solar cells, li-ion batteries, photocatalysts, drug delivery, biosensors, and gas sensors, etc. Shouhua Feng is a professor of the College of Chemistry, State Key Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Preparative Chemistry, Jilin University. He was born in 1956 in Jilin, and obtained his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from Jilin University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University from 1989–1992 and an honorary scientist at Aberdeen University in 1995. Since 1992 he is a professor of chemistry at Jilin University, and was elected Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005. His research interests include hydrothermal and solvothermal syntheses of microporous crystals, inorganic functional solids, and inorganic–organic hybrid materials. He is the Third President of the International Solvothermal and Hydrothermal Association (ISHA). He is currently Director of the Scientific Committee of Jilin University and Director of International Joint Research Laboratory of Nano-Micro Architecture Chemistry (NMAC).