Meeting the Clean Energy Demand: Nanostructure Architectures for Solar Energy Conversion

By Prashant Kamat. 2007

2,084 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The increasing energy demand in the near future will force us to seek environmentally clean alternative energy resources. The emergence of nanomaterials as the new building blocks to construct light energy harvesting assemblies has opened up new ways to utilize renewable energy sources. This article discusses three major ways to utilize nanostructures for the design of solar energy conversion devices: (i) Mimicking photosynthesis with donor−acceptor molecular assemblies or clusters, (ii) semiconductor assisted photocatalysis to produce fuels such as hydrogen, and (iii) nanostructure semiconductor based solar cells. This account further highlights some of the recent developments in these areas and points out the factors that limit the efficiency optimization. Strategies to employ ordered assemblies of semiconductor and metal nanoparticles, inorganic-organic hybrid assemblies, and carbon nanostructures in the energy conversion schemes are also discussed. Directing the future research efforts toward utiliza...

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba80df1fa9f680145a5d3a84a70feaace65462e3

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In Materials Chemistry

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

Towards Oxide Electronics: a Roadmap (2019, background): “The increasing energy demand during the last decade has led to the need of seeking alternatives to conventional silicon solar cells [683].”