Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

Well-Defined Nanographene–Rhenium Complex as an Efficient Electrocatalyst and Photocatalyst for Selective CO2 Reduction

An international team has achieved a new milestone in the quest to recycle CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere into carbon-neutral fuels and others materials. The chemists have engineered a molecule that uses light or electricity to convert the greenhouse gas CO2 into CO more efficiently than any other method of “carbon reduction.” “If you can create an efficient enough molecule for this reaction, it will produce energy that is free and storable in the form of fuels,” said Li, associate professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Chemistry.

Burning fuel – such as carbon monoxide – produces carbon dioxide and releases energy...

New materials are created through deposition onto disks, which are then tested to determine their properties. Credit: Caltech

A new materials discovery approach puts solar fuels on the fast track to commercial viability. Combining computational with experimental approaches, researchers identify 12 new materials with use in solar fuels generators. Researchers at Caltech and Berkeley Lab have – in just 2 years – nearly doubled the number of materials known to have potential for use in solar fuels.

Researchers are exploring a range of target fuels, from hydrogen gas to liquid hydrocarbons, and producing any of these fuels involves splitting water...

Researchers developed a device that uses florescence from oil (left) to detect its presence and identify the type of oil. The small and simple device incorporates inexpensive electronic components (right). Credit: Oscar Sampedro, Universidade de Vigo.

Simple sensing device could make cleanup easier by identifying the type of oil involved in a spill. The device is designed to float on the water, where it could remotely monitor a small area susceptible to pollution or track the evolution of contamination at a particular location. “Fast detection of a spill is crucial for a quick antipollution response to avoid, as much as possible, the progressive mixture of the oil into the water, which would make cleaning more difficult and inefficient,” said Jose R...

Jun Wang (sitting), Christopher Eng (standing), Jiajun Wang (left, laptop screen), and Liguang Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory used transmission x-ray microscopy combined with spectroscopy to produce the colored maps shown on the large screen. These maps reveal the structural expansion (and the resulting cracks/fractures) and chemical composition changes that occur as sodium ions (Fe, green) are added to and removed from iron sulfide (FeS, red) during the battery’s first discharge/charge cycle. The pristine iron sulfide (box in upper left) does not return to its original state after this cycle, as some sodium ions remain trapped in the core (box in lower right). As a result, there is an initial loss in battery capacity. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

“We discovered that the ...