Design of Hollow Nanostructures for Energy Storage, Conversion and Production

Abstract

Hollow nanostructures have shown great promise for energy storage, conversion, and production technologies. Significant efforts have been devoted to the design and synthesis of hollow nanostructures with diverse compositional and geometric characteristics in the past decade. However, the correlation between their structure and energy-related performance has not been reviewed thoroughly in the literature. Here, some representative examples of designing hollow nanostructure to effectively solve the problems of energy-related technologies are highlighted, such as lithium-ion batteries, lithium-metal anodes, lithium-sulfur batteries, supercapacitors, dye-sensitized solar cells, electrocatalysis, and photoelectrochemical cells. The great effect of structure engineering on the performance is discussed in depth, which will benefit the better design of hollow nanostructures to fulfill the requirements of specific applications and simultaneously enrich the diversity of the hollow nanostructure family. Finally, future directions of hollow nanostructure design to solve emerging challenges and further improve the performance of energy-related technologies are also provided.

Keywords: dye-sensitized solar cells; hollow nanostructure design; rechargeable batteries; structure-performance correlation; supercapacitors.