A Review of Functional Materials for Energy and Environmental Applications

Abstract

Functional materials play a key role in meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals related to energy and clean water. Progress in science and technology has accelerated the demand for facilitating clean energy conversion, storage, and transfer. Materials research focuses on two aspects: distance and coupling. The energetic distance corresponds to the ratio of energy to thermal energy. Probes such as methane and ammonia address the target impurity to reach the optimal distance for coupling.

Designing functional materials for energy and environmental applications must consider stability, cost, scalability, and stop time. Functional materials should be continuously monitored and characterized during operational conditions to assess ageing of active sites. Characterizing works at this stage can be comparable to searching for a needle in a haystack. Gathering appropriate protocol settings and recognizing specific active sites or signals encountered in already characterized materials provides a prior knowledge toolkit. Many functional materials exhibit reversible and irreversible processes without consistent recommendations on preconditioning protocols or tend to overlook minor signals that could be influential. Large quantity of sensing connections existing among different materials and modalities could tie together multimodes and synthesize data on materials collection. Sensor may establish connection to transient signals linking different generations of materials. Attention has been drawn to big data in various fields during the past decade (Hilal, 2019).

Keywords: Functional materials, energy and environmental applications, Data acquisition, AI-based data-driven analysis.