Abstract:
Porous Materials for Energy Storage and Conversion
Global warming, energy conversion and energy storage are some of the major challenges in today?s world. As the world population is rising at a fast rate, the burden on fossil fuels, to fulfill the energy demands, is increasing drastically. It is predicted that the energy demand will grow by two folds in next 15 years.1 So the major concern for the scientists is to find out cheap, clean and renewable energy sources. This can be achieved in several ways, one of them being the use of electrochemical reactions. Several electrochemical energy systeM.S. have been developed but the most effective and efficient developments include fuel cells, electrochemical overall water splitting and metal-air batteries. But these all rely on some basic yet energy demanding processes which include oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), water oxidation or oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). These reactions generally take place at the surface, but the catalytic activity can be improved if the reactants reach the catalytic sites, not only on the surface but also in the bulk. So, the best deal to make this is possible is to use the high surface area porous materials (Figure 1) for the energy storage and conversion as the active materials.
