Advanced Electrode Materials and Electrocatalysts for Energy Systems

With the extensive use of non-renewable fossil fuels, environmental concerns and energy issues have come to the fore, and the demand for clean, highly efficient and sustainable energy sources has greatly increased. Many efforts have been devoted to developing various renewable energy resources, such as wind, solar and tidal energy sources. Due to the intermittent and uncontrollable characteristics of these energy resources, energy storage devices are required to deal with such problems. The electrochemical energy systems and power networks are the main energy storage technologies, and the electrochemical energy storage is considered as one of the most high-efficiency energy storage ways. Electrode materials are the key components of electrochemical energy systems, however, the traditional electrode materials cannot meet the demands of the future energy storage devices due to the low specific capacities, short lifetime, and poor safety. Therefore, it is urgent to explore and develop new electrode materials. Various novel electrode materials have been researched, such as transition metal oxides, lithium metal, Si-based materials and metal organic frameworks. The new electrodes exhibit high specific capacity, however, many problems still need to be solved before commercialization. For example, the volume expansion of transition metal oxides and Si-based materials will result in the rapid decay of specific capacity, and the growth of lithium metal dendrites will lead to safety concerns.

In addition, fuel cells are environmental energy technologies. However, the high cost of the fuel cells mainly due to the precious-based nanocatalysts limits their commercial application. It’s essential to develop precious-based nanocatalysts with high catalytic performance in order to reduce the dosage of precious metal in fuel cells. Control the composition and morphology of precious-based nanocatalysts is a key way to improve their catalytic performance.

The Research Topic will focus on the key components of the various advanced electrochemical energy systems with high-performance , including anode materials, cathode materials, electrolytes and separators etc. For the fuel cells, the topic is mainly involved in the design and applications of precious metal-based nanomaterials for electrocatalysis. We welcome Original Research, Review, Mini-Review, etc. on potential topics including, but not limited to:
• Metal-ion batteries;
• Metal-air batteries;
• Metal-sulfur batteries;
• Supercapacitors;
• High-performance anode/cathode materials, electrolytes, separators;
• Computational modeling;
• Synthesis of precious metal-based nanomaterials and applications in direct methanol/ethanol/ethylene glycol/ammonia fuel cells.

Keywords: Secondary batteries, Supercapacitors, Electrodes, Electrolytes, Fuel cells

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.