3D printing of metal-based materials for renewable energy applications
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partment of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-2210, USA Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, CA 94550, USA 3 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180, USA 2
© Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Received: 11 September 2020 / Revised: 2 November 2020 / Accepted: 9 November 2020
ABSTRACT Large-scale renewable energy must overcome conversion and storage challenges before it can replace fossil fuels due to its intermittent nature. However, current sustainable energy devices still suffer from high cost, low efficiency, and poor service life problems. Recently, porous metal-based materials have been widely used as desirable cross-functional platforms for electrochemical and photochemical energy systems for their unique electrical conductivity, catalytic activity, and chemical stability. To tailor the porosity length scale, ordering, and compositions, 3D printing has been applied as a disruptive manufacturing revolution to create complex architected components by directly joining sequential layers into designed structures. This article intends to summarize cuttingedge advances of metal-based materials for renewable energy devices (e.g., fuel cells, solar cells, supercapacitors, and batteries) over the past decade.
KEYWORDS renewable energy, metal catalysts, nanomaterials, porous structure, 3D printing, additive manufacturing
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Introduction
Modern society greatly depends on different forms of energy generation, conversion, and storage, and this demand is predicted to grow rapidly over the upcoming decades [1]. To satisfy future societal needs, various new materials and manufacturing methods have been explored to improve the efficiency, capacity and scalability of energy devices [2–24]. By tuning both the composition and structure of a material at different length scales, researchers have achieved significant improvements in battery, capacitor, solar cell, electrolyzer, and fuel cell technologies [5, 23–29]. Nanostructured thin film materials have been shown to achieve some of promising results [29, 30]. However, thick materials with hierarchically designed architectures have demonstrated their unique advantages over 2D counterparts to completely change the status of renewable energy limitations [30–33]. Almost every metal on the periodic table is somehow used in everyday energy applications [34]. For example, Co, Cu and Cd are highly used in energy production of transportation whereas other scarce metals like La show an increasing trend in their demand for use in batteries [34]. There is also great potential that metal organic frameworks (MOF) present over other porous materials in energy related applications due to their excellent gas storage properties and photoactive ligands [35]. Huang et al. showed the increasing trend of studies related to porous metal and metal-oxide materials for energy storage and catalysis applications
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