Volume 3, Issue 1

The development of advanced electrode materials for high-performance energy storage devices becomes more and more important for growing demand of portable electronics and electrical vehicles. To speed up this process, rapid screening of exceptional materials among various morphologies, structures and sizes of materials is urgently needed. Benefitting from the advance of nanotechnology, tremendous efforts have been devoted to the development of various nanofabrication strategies for advanced electrode materials. This review focuses on the analysis of novel nanofabrication strategies and progress in the field of fast screening advanced electrode materials. The basic design principles for chemical reaction, crystallization, electrochemical reaction to control the composition and nanostructure of final electrodes are reviewed. Novel fast nanofabrication strategies, such as burning, electrochemical exfoliation, and their basic principles are also summarized. More importantly, colloid system served as one up-front design can skip over the materials synthesis, accelerating the screening rate of highperformance electrode. This work encourages us to create innovative design ideas for rapid screening high-active electrode materials for applications in energy-related fields and beyond.

The polyanion polystyrene sulfonate (PSS), the polycation poly (allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH), and the anionic poly (N-isopropylacrylamide-co-acrylic acid) [P(NIPAM-co-AA)] microgels were self-assembled onto the polyethylene imine (PEI) adsorbed gold surfaces of quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) because of the electrostatic attractions. The interactions of various metal particles including Ca 2+ , Bi 3+ , Cu 2+ , Zn 2+ , Ni 2+ , Sn 2+ , Co 2+ , and Cd 2+ with the obtained PEI/PSS/PAH/microgel layer in aqueous solutions were evaluated by QCM. The PEI/PSS/PAH/Microgel covered QCM sensor demonstrates the lowest detection limit of 0.1 ppm in aqueous solutions and the obviously linear connection between the frequency response and Ni 2+ concentration from 0.1 to 20 ppm, which is due to the complexation of Ni 2+ with the carboxyl groups of microgels. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was used to reveal the morphology and stability of the self-assembled polyelectrolyte/microgel layer before and after adsorbing heavy metal ions. These self-assembled materials of polyelectrolyte/microgel layer will be helpful for manufacturing ion-selective materials for separation and identification purposes.