Materials Science and Engineering: R: Reports最新文献

In the current era of globalization, the exponential surge in the production, consumption, and disposal of agricultural and post-consumer polymeric waste material has emerged as a pressing environmental concern of paramount importance. The current situation, wherein the presence of plastic particles and other plastic-based contaminants in the food supply chain is increasingly evident, poses a profound health risk to mankind. In this regard, the utilization of conventional waste management practices, such as, open burning, landfilling, and incineration, leads to adverse consequences, like, the emission of greenhouse gases and substantial economic losses. To encounter such problems, researchers are actively engaged in the development of innovative recycling processes aimed at closed-loop circular economy by transforming these wastes into sustainable value added products. This comprehensive review emphasizes the necessity of sustainable recycling of lignocellulosic biomass and synthetic plastic wastes, with a specific focus on their transformation into biodegradable polymers and their potential biomedical applications. Moreover, we have critically discussed the recent trends and drivers in this field, global environment threat, different recycling route of lignocellulosic biomass and synthetic polymer wastes. Furthermore, this review provides a detailed discussion on the applications of these biodegradable polymers in the field of tissue engineering, drug delivery, and antimicrobial applications. Additionally, we have also addressed the critical challenges involved in this field and possible solutions to overcome them.

As an important component of future electronic devices, photodetectors require mechanical flexibility, and stretchability to meet the demands of conformal, portable, and lightweight applications. As expected, flexible photodetectors (FPDs) were born timely and have obtained rapid development driven by the considerable progress of the optoelectronic industry. Especially, FPDs appear to serve as a bridge between electronic information systems and biological systems due to their potential functional applications including wearable devices, artificial intelligence, bionics devices, etc. However, the poor mechanical stability, narrow spectral response range, low responsivities and difficulty in miniaturization of traditional FPDs have greatly limited their commercial and industrial applications. One of the most promising routes toward addressing the inherent shortcomings of FPDs is through constructing novel micro/nano-structured integrated flexible detection systems to achieve diverse functions and enhance performance, hence facilitating flexible integration. In this review, the recent advances in performance-enhancing strategies for FPDs are outlined and discussed. First, the detection mechanism, performance enhancement mode, and key figures-of-merit of FPDs are summarized and basic design principles of the FPDs are discussed emphatically. Then, recent progress in structural engineering-based performance enhancement of FPDs is reviewed, categorized by the types of enhancement, electric field manipulation engineering, strain engineering, and optical field manipulation engineering. Moreover, this review also summarizes the integration strategies for the application of FPDs and finally puts forward the challenges and future research directions in these fields.

Ensuring the fire safety of high voltage (HV) outdoor insulators is key to maintain the reliable operation of the electrical grid. This requires the careful selection of suitable polymeric composite materials with excellent electrical tracking, erosion, and fire resistance characteristics. To improve their performance against electrical tracking and potential combustion issues, inorganic additives are commonly integrated into these materials. The focus of this review article is on describing the progress and innovations in enhancing the electrical tracking, erosion, and fire performance of polymeric materials by incorporating inorganic additives. The main objective is to explore the development of these materials and showcase their evaluation through laboratory testing. This study highlights significant state-of-the-art advancements in the field, providing valuable insights into its current progress. Additionally, the research outlines prospects, offering a peek at how upcoming studies are expected to further advance the scientific knowledge in the field. By disseminating critical information about the development, testing, and future potential of polymeric materials containing inorganic additives, this work is expected to facilitate researchers in advancing their work in HV outdoor insulation, leading to more efficient electrical insulation solutions for safer and reliable electrical grids.

Mechanical Metamaterials (MMs) are artificially designed structures with extraordinary properties that are dependent on micro architectures and spatial tessellations of unit cells, rather than constitutive compositions. They have demonstrated promising and attractive application potentials in practical engineering. Recently, how to rationally design novel MMs and discover their multifunctional behaviors has received tremendous discussions with rapid progress, particularly in the last ten years with an enormous increase of publications and citations. Herein, we present a comprehensive overview of considerable advances of MMs, including critical focuses at different scales, forward and inverse design mechanisms with optimization formulations, micro architectures of unit cells, and their spatial tessellations in discovering novel MMs and future prospects. The implications in clarifying the four focuses at levels from the global to the physical in MMs are highlighted, that is, unique structures designed for unique functions, unique micro unit cells placed in unique locations, unique micro unit cells designed for unique properties and unique micro unit cells evaluated by unique mechanisms. We examine the inverse designs of MMs with intrinsic mechanisms of structure-property driven characteristics to achieve unprecedented behaviors, which are involved into material designs and multiscale designs. The former primarily optimizes micro architectures to explore novel MMs, and the latter focuses on micro architectures and spatial tessellations to promote multifunctional applications of MMs in engineering. Finally, we propose several promising research topics with serious challenges in design formulations, micro architectures, spatial tessellations and industrial applications.

Lead halide perovskites with excellent optoelectronic properties have attracted extensive attention and made amazing progress for X-ray detectors and imaging. However, lead is highly toxic to humans, animals and ecosystems, posing a great safety concern to its commercial application. It has become an urgent need to develop stable and environment-friendly lead-free alternatives. In this review, we summarize recent progress in lead-free halide perovskites (LFHPs) and derivatives toward X-ray detectors and imaging. First, we introduce the working principle of X-ray detectors and the key figure of merit in direct and indirect detection processes. In addition, we summarize state-of-the-art lead-free halide perovskites preparation methods. Furthermore, we comprehensively discuss the structural dimensions, optoelectronic properties of lead-free halide perovskites and their recent advances in X-ray detection and imaging. Meanwhile, the stabilities of LFHPs-based X-ray detectors are discussed. Finally, we outline several main issues of state-of-the-art LFHPs-based X-ray detectors and provide prospects to overcome these limitations.

Portable, affordable, and miniaturized electrochemical sensors for point-of-care diagnostic devices represent a step towards achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being. Over the last 10 years, rapid advancements in three-dimensional (3D) printing technology (additive manufacturing) have enabled the production of low-cost, miniature 3D printed (3DP) devices for bio-chemical sensing, enabling innovation in healthcare diagnostics for everyone regardless of their economic background or geographical location. Compared to traditional manufacturing processes, 3D printing offers numerous advantages for miniaturized electrochemical point-of-care diagnostic devices, such as rapid prototyping, custom-shaped devices, flexible fabrication designs, low energy consumption, reduced time to market, and reduced waste generation. This article reviews recent developments in 3DP electrochemical sensors, including the printing of composite materials, advanced electrode architectures, activation and functionalization methods, and electrochemical sensing performance (i.e. sensitivity, linear range, limits of detection) towards various analytes, including heavy metals/water pollutants, toxic/explosive substances, neurotransmitters/stimulants, metabolites, DNA, amino acids, proteins, viruses, and food pathogens. Moreover, we discuss the remaining challenges and gaps in current knowledge and solutions to improve the electroanalytic performance of 3DP electrodes for future biomedical applications in wearable and smart-implantable sensor systems of the future.

The reversible phase transition in vanadium dioxide (VO₂) with light, heat, electric, magnetic, and mechanical stimuli is the enabling concept to function as a smart material. It is the basis for the development of numerous varieties of VO₂-based optical, electrochemical, electrical, mechanical, and energy storage devices in micron- to nano-meter scale dimensions on rigid and flexible platforms. Due to its near room temperature (RT) phase transition, VO₂ is considered an excellent alternative and promising candidate to replace the conventional materials used in various applications. Ample interests have been growing to apply VO₂ in novel devices, exploring the device functionality by structural manipulation of VO₂ that could lead to impressive innovations. Much effort is invested in resolving the practical challenges to deal with real-life applications, along with finding out industrially feasible large-scale VO₂-based device fabrication methodology which may act as a stepping stone to embark on the commercial market. In this context, it is crucial to review the recent advancements in devices that use VO₂ smart material as a building element in the device architecture along with the device operation controlled by the phase transition mechanism in VO₂. This review summarizes the new applications of VO₂ in various devices. We start with a brief introduction of the present landscape of various phase transition mechanisms involved in VO₂ followed by significant advantages of VO₂ as a functional material for various applications. In the main part of the paper, the recent five years’ progress in VO₂-based single-stimulus, multi-stimuli, and multifunctional devices, their operation mechanism, and important experimental and theoretical breakthroughs are summarized under each device. Although VO₂ plays a significant role in controlling the device operation, various practical challenges are there to be rectified to further enhance the device performance that would accelerate VO₂-based devices in reaching the commercial platform. Future trends, possible challenges in VO₂-based devices, and potential solutions are presented with perspectives in the final part of the paper.

The application of wearable sensors in domains related to healthcare systems, human motion detection, robotics, and human–machine interactions has attracted significant attention. Because these applications require stretchable, flexible, and non-invasive materials, polymer composites are now at the forefront of research aimed at preparing innovative wearable sensors. Three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques can be used to obtain highly customised and scalable polymer composites to fabricate wearable sensors, which is a challenging task for conventional fabrication techniques. This review provides insights into the prospects of commonly used conductive nanomaterials and 3D printing techniques to prepare wearable devices. Subsequently, the research progress, sensing mechanisms, and performance of 3D-printed wearable sensors, such as strain, pressure, temperature, and humidity sensors, are discussed. In addition, novel 3D-printed multifunctional sensors, such as multi-directional, multi-modal, self-healable, self-powered, in situ printed, and ultrasonic sensors, are highlighted. The challenges and future trends for further research development are clarified.

In the past few decades, electrochemical energy storage systems, represented by alkali metal ion batteries and supercapacitors, have developed rapidly against the background of sustainable development. However, supercapacitors and alkali metal ion batteries, known for the high power density and high energy density, respectively, have struggled to meet the demand of high both power and energy densities energy storage devices. Therefore, integrating both energy storage mechanisms of supercapacitors and alkali metal ion batteries in the same system to attain device with comparatively high both power and energy densities has become the preferred approach for most researchers, and the representatives are assembling hybrid ion capacitors or introducing capacitive contribution into alkali metal ion batteries materials for fast-charging alkali metal ion batteries. For the former, many good quality publications have summarized and evaluated it, while the latter has not. In this review, we systematically summarize and insightfully discuss the phenomenon of introducing capacitive contribution into electrode materials of alkali metal ion batteries. Different methods of identifying capacitive and diffusive behaviors are reviewed, and the origin of the capacitive contribution in the battery materials combining the charge storage mechanism are explained, the influences of electrode materials’ capacitive contribution on battery’s energy and power densities are discussed in detail. Finally, we propose a design idea of electrode materials for battery with high both power and energy densities based on accurately understanding the rational capacitive contribution.

By imitating natural water circulation, artificial water generation processes can produce clean water by utilizing readily available and inexhaustible solar energy. Such a process can address the current global crises related to both energy and water shortages, and expand currently available water resources from rivers, ground water and ice to seawater, brackish water and atmospheric humidity. Among the many materials used for water generation, aerogels offer a great potential due to the inherent combination of three-dimensional, monolithic structure and porous, interconnected network. In this article, we review aerogel-based water generation from brine and atmospheric water. The unique features of aerogels are elucidated from the viewpoint of photo-thermal conversion and water transport. These two components are necessary to achieve efficient solar-driven water production systems. In addition to describing the material specifications, this paper reviews a diversity of structural designs that aim to improve the evaporation performance, including the assembly strategy of light absorption and thermal insulation layers, the reduction of evaporation enthalpy, and the salt-rejection control, as well as Marangoni effect. After evaluating different types of solar-powered water utilization technologies, the paper ends with the challenges for the commercialization and widespread use of aerogel-based water production systems: their disconnect from the current aerogel industry, high production cost and weak mechanical properties, and a lack of standardized performance testing, as well as our future perspective for their application opportunities.