Department of Materials, Royal School of Mines, Imperial College London, LondonSW7 2AZ, England, U.K.
Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, LondonSW7 2AZ, England, U.K.
Chem Rev. 2023 Mar 8;123(5):2311-2348. doi: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.2c00429. Epub 2022 Nov 10.
The development of efficient and sustainable electrochemical systems able to provide clean-energy fuels and chemicals is one of the main current challenges of materials science and engineering. Over the last decades, significant advances have been made in the development of robust electrocatalysts for different reactions, with fundamental insights from both computational and experimental work. Some of the most promising systems in the literature are based on expensive and scarce platinum-group metals; however, natural enzymes show the highest per-site catalytic activities, while their active sites are based exclusively on earth-abundant metals. Additionally, natural biomass provides a valuable feedstock for producing advanced carbonaceous materials with porous hierarchical structures. Utilizing resources and design inspiration from nature can help create more sustainable and cost-effective strategies for manufacturing cost-effective, sustainable, and robust electrochemical materials and devices. This review spans from materials to device engineering; we initially discuss the design of carbon-based materials with bioinspired features (such as enzyme active sites), the utilization of biomass resources to construct tailored carbon materials, and their activity in aqueous electrocatalysis for water splitting, oxygen reduction, and CO reduction. We then delve in the applicability of bioinspired features in electrochemical devices, such as the engineering of bioinspired mass transport and electrode interfaces. Finally, we address remaining challenges, such as the stability of bioinspired active sites or the activity of metal-free carbon materials, and discuss new potential research directions that can open the gates to the implementation of bioinspired sustainable materials in electrochemical devices.
开发高效、可持续的电化学系统，以提供清洁能源燃料和化学品，是材料科学与工程领域当前面临的主要挑战之一。在过去几十年中，在开发用于不同反应的稳健电催化剂方面取得了重大进展，这得益于计算和实验工作的共同推动。文献中一些最有前途的系统基于昂贵且稀缺的铂族金属；然而，天然酶显示出最高的单位催化活性，而其活性位点仅基于丰富的地球金属。此外，天然生物质为生产具有多孔分级结构的先进碳质材料提供了有价值的原料。利用自然界的资源和设计灵感可以帮助创造更可持续和具有成本效益的策略，用于制造具有成本效益、可持续和稳健的电化学材料和器件。本综述涵盖了从材料到器件工程的各个方面；我们首先讨论了具有生物启发特征（如酶活性位点）的碳基材料的设计，利用生物质资源构建定制碳材料，以及它们在水分解、氧还原和 CO 还原等水相电催化中的活性。然后，我们深入探讨了生物启发特征在电化学器件中的适用性，例如生物启发质量传递和电极界面的工程设计。最后，我们讨论了剩余的挑战，例如生物启发活性位点的稳定性或无金属碳材料的活性，并讨论了新的潜在研究方向，这些方向可以为在电化学器件中实施生物启发可持续材料开辟道路。
