Synthesis and Characterization of ZnO Nanostructures for Energy Harvesting
A special issue of Materials (ISSN 1996-1944).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2020) | Viewed by 4400
Special Issue Editor
Interests: synthesis and characterization of nanomaterials for energy and environment; ZnO nanostructures; nanogenerator of electricity; photocatalysis; water purification; air purification
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Dear Colleagues,
ZnO is a multifunctional material possessing unique electrical, optical, acoustic, and mechanical properties. Nanostructured ZnO is one of the most fascinating nanomaterials due to its outstanding properties, including a wide direct bandgap of 3.37 eV, a high exciton binding energy of 60 meV, high electron mobility at room temperature, piezoelectricity, chemical and thermal stability, and biocompatibility.
With improvement in growth technology, ZnO nanomaterials can be obtained in a wide variety of geometrical shapes, including nanoparticles, nanorods, nanowires, nanobelts, nanosprings, nanocombs, etc. Nowadays, high-quality single-crystal ZnO nanowire arrays can be synthesized even at low growth temperatures (<100°C), usually in chemical bath solution, this simple growth process has great potential for the integration of ZnO nanowires into hybrid systems and could be applied to flexible nanosystems.
Among all promising applications of ZnO nanomaterials, nanostructured ZnO is attracting increasing attention for its potential applications in emerging energy related research fields. ZnO nanomaterials can be used in piezoelectric nanogenerators, nanostructured photovoltaic solar cells, hydrogen production by water splitting, etc.
Since the demonstration of the first nanogenerator based on piezoelectric ZnO nanowires by Z.L. Wang’s research team of Georgia Tech (USA) in 2006, a great interest has been aroused to develop the energy harvesting using the piezoelectric ZnO nanowires as they are able to convert mechanical energy into electricity.
In recent years, ZnO has been considered one of the best photocatalysts due to its abundance in nature, low cost, non-toxicity, high electron mobility and good electrochemical stability. Thus, ZnO nanostructure based photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting process, a clean and sustainable approach to produce hydrogen energy, has been widely studied.
As an n-type semiconductor, ZnO is also widely used in various solar cell structures; including dye-sensitized, organic, hybrid and solid-state solar cells. Furthermore, the nanostructured forms lead to an increased light absorption, while also increasing the electron pathways for carrier collection. Both factors favors the light harvesting and hence the solar cell efficiency.
It is my pleasure to invite you to submit original research papers, as well as review papers within the scope of this Special Issue.
Prof. Yamin Leprince-Wang
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- ZnO
- Nanostructures
- Smart Materials
- Energy Harvesting
- Synthesis
- Characterization
- Piezoelectric
- Nanogenerators
- Photovoltaic
- Solar Cells
- Water Slitting
- Photocatalyst
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