Upcycling biowaste into advanced carbon materials via low-temperature plasma hybrid system: applications, mechanisms, strategies and future prospects.

This review focuses on the recent advances in the sustainable conversion of biowaste to valuable carbonaceous materials. This study summarizes the significant progress in biowaste-derived carbon materials (BCMs) via a plasma hybrid system. This includes systematic studies like AI-based multi-coupling systems, promising synthesis strategies from an economic point of view, and their potential applications towards energy, environment, and biomedicine. Plasma modified BCM has a new transition lattice phase and exhibits high resilience, while fabrication and formation mechanisms of BCMs are reviewed in plasma hybrid system. A unique 2D structure can be designed and formulated from the biowaste with fascinating physicochemical properties like high surface area, unique defect sites, and excellent conductivity. The structure of BCMs offers various activated sites for element doping and it shows satisfactory adsorption capability, and dynamic performance in the field of electrochemistry. In recent years, many studies have been reported on the biowaste conversion into valuable materials for various applications. Synthesis methods are an indispensable factor that directly affects the structure and properties of BCMs. Therefore, it is imperative to review the facile synthesis methods and the mechanisms behind the formation of BCMs derived from the low-temperature plasma hybrid system, which is the necessity to obtain BCMs having desirable structure and properties by choosing a suitable synthesis process. Advanced carbon-neutral materials could be widely synthesized as catalysts for application in environmental remediation, energy conversion and storage, and biotechnology.

Copper ferrite and cobalt oxide two-layer coated macroporous SiC substrate for efficient CO2-splitting and thermochemical energy conversion.

CO2-splitting and thermochemical energy conversion effectiveness are still challenged by the selectivity of metal/metal oxide-based redox materials and associated chemical reaction constraints. This study proposed an interface/substrate engineering approach for improving CO2-splitting and thermochemical energy conversion through CuFe2O4 and Co3O4 two-layer coating SiC. The newly prepared material reactive surface area available for gas-solid reactions is characterized by micro-pores CuFe2O4 alloy easing inter-layer oxygen micro mass exchanges across a highly stable SiC-Co3O4 layer. Through a thermogravimetry analysis, oxidation of the thermally activated oxygen carriers exhibited remarkably CO2-splitting capacities with a total CO yield of 1919.33 µmol/g at 1300 °C. The further analysis of the material CO2-splitting performance at the reactor scale resulted in 919.04 mL (788.94 µmol/g) of CO yield with an instantaneous CO production rate of 22.52 mL/min and chemical energy density of 223.37 kJ/kg at 1000 °C isothermal redox cycles. The reaction kinetic behavior indicated activation energy of 30.65 kJ/mol, which suggested faster CO2 activation and oxidation kinetic on SiC-Co3O4-CuFe2O4 O-deficit surfaces. The underlying mechanism for the remarkable thermochemical performances was analyzed by combining experiment and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The significance of exploiting the synergy between CuFe2O4 and Co3O4 layers and stoichiometric reaction characteristics provided fundamental insights useful for the theoretical modeling and practical application of the solar thermochemical process.

Simple and fast approach to exploit the spectral reflection properties of liquid media.

Bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) are of importance for their wide applications. In this study, we presented a simple and fast approach to measure the spectral BRDF of both solid and liquid samples. Based on this approach, we fabricated a prototype and measured the BRDF value of some liquid samples such as water and NaCl solution at different wavelengths. According to the experimental data, we discussed the trend of the BRDF value of the NaCl solution of different concentrations. Then, the experimental data of the different NaCl solution at 637 nm were used to invert the parameters of a five-parameter model. Additionally, we fitted the parameters as a polynomial.