Exohedral Mxene Advanced Heterostructures for Clean Energy

Abstract

Exohedral nanomaterials are quite garnering interest in the modern materials days. These classes of materials come with exohedral pores without any internal pores, which is advantageous for electrochemical applications, viz; dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) and supercapacitors. Exohedral nature originated from the surface curvature and sometimes due to their inter/intra-cluster particles nature. This curvature consequences in complex materials physics and hence, its related electrochemical applications. Mulitshelled fullerenes, otherwise known as carbon nano-onions (CNOs), are an exohedral class of carbon nanostructures with positive curvature over endohedral porous carbon. The exohedral natures come from their zero-dimension and exohedral pores, which essentially allow easy access to the electrolyte ions. We will discuss the first-time implementation of this kind of exohedral materials as optically transparent DSSCs for windows applications in rooftops and building walls. Also, the possibility of in-situ doping for these materials and their enhanced photoconversion efficiencies are under investigation. Notably, the ideal heterostructure construction out of highly conducting 2D MXenes would be a potential approach to achieve high electrochemical conversion and storage efficiencies.