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The exploitation of low-cost, non-fossil membrane materials with flourishing pore structure is essential to complete an organic dye wastewater treatment in Fenton-like catalytic technology. The accessible and scalable veneer functionalized Fenton-like catalysis has been manufactured to decolorize the effluents by a hydrogen peroxide-Mn-based oxides system. The nanocatalyst of Mn-based oxides has been loaded on the veneer surface by the hydrothermal in-situ growth, which could accomplish the coupling of Fenton-like catalyst and membrane technology. Fir and poplar veneers with unique three-dimensional porous structure have been investigated in detail to manifest the respective performance of decolorization during the dye wastewater treatment. This work not only has invented a promising membrane material coupling with Fenton-like catalysis to dispose dye wastewater, but also provides a reference in high-performance membrane design of biomimetic membrane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructing electrode materials with great ion transfer ability, highly porous, and good electrical conductivity is of significance for realizing high-performance electrochemical double-layer capacitors. Here, the N-PC (N-doped porous carbon)/HWCF (hollow wooden carbon fiber) composites that have all the features were synthesized, which was obtained from carbonization of the mixture of hollow wood fiber (HWF)/ZIF-8 and pore-forming substances. It was found that ZIF-8 nanoparticles are closely packed forming a uniform ZIF layer fully covering the external surface of WF by the electrostatic interaction. They were converted into the inter-connect N-PC network anchoring on the HWF surface after calcination, which provided a continuous conductive network for electrons. The resulting N-PC/HWCF-based electrodes exhibited impressive electrochemical performance. The specific capacitance of N-PC/HWCF-800 is 121 F/g at a current density of 0.5 A/g with excellent cycling stability over 10000 cycles. Furthermore, the symmetrical supercapacitors (SSCs) with two N-PC/HWCF-800 electrodes delivered an encouraging energy density of 4.8 Wh kg−1 when the power density is as high as 3600 W/kg. This study provides insights for the design of hierarchical porous carbon structure towards next-generation high-power smart devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discharge of dye industry wastewater without any proper treatments has raised tremendous concerns due to its hazardous nature and potential risks. Photocatalytic degradation is a promising technology for environmentally friendly and sustainable treatment of dye pollutants. Nanomaterial-based photocatalysts have been successfully applied to treat industrial dye wastewater. Among them, titanium dioxide (TiO2) with diverse nanostructure and numerous advantages has garnered significant attentions. However, the morphological difference of TiO2 is of paramount importance for enhancing its degradation performance. This review provides an overview of recent advances in various forms of multidimensional TiO2, including 0D nanoparticles, 1D nanowires, nanotubes, nanofibers, and nanorods, 2D nanosheets and nanoplates, as well as assembled 3D micro-nano structures, for photocatalytic dye wastewater treatment. The article could briefly elaborate the conventional synthesis routes, advantages, challenges, and application areas of TiO2 in different dimensions, and compares their photocatalytic degradation performance and mechanisms. Simultaneously, these approaches of modified performances by doping metal ions and non-metal ions have emphatically involved over here. Noteworthily, the insights into the future trends, challenges, and prospects of multidimensional TiO2 materials have been also proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing the ignition temperature of aromatic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is a long-term pursuit for environmental pollution treatment and industrial application. In this paper, the toluene catalytic combustion was ignited at ultra-low temperature of 73 °C over a poplar wood monolithic catalyst with highly dispersed Pd particles coated by nano-thick graphited carbon layer via in-situ carbonization. Combing the characterizations and DFT calculations, the satisfying catalytic performance could be attributed to two aspects: (i) the unrestricted mass transfer of reactant and the high dispersity of Pd were simultaneously ensured in the straight micrometer-channel with abundant surface anchoring groups of poplar wood; (ii) the nano-thick graphited carbon layer on Pd significantly enhanced the oxygen activation. Given the low cost of economic wood and facile preparation technique, this work opened up new alternative for the preparation of highly dispersed noble metal catalyst and the low temperature catalytic combustion of aromatic VOCs in industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, wood with unique porous structure, renewability, low cost and easy processing has attracted increasing attentions, which are frequently used as a structural functional material in energy, environment, catalysis and other applications. For energy storage/conversion, high electrical conductivity of wood is desirable for its feasible application. However, carbonization treatment as commonly used method to improve the conductivity of wood will sacrifice its mechanical strength. Here, reduced graphene oxide as excellent conductive coating has been used to improve electrical conductivity of pristine wood without any carbonization process. After graphene oxide reduction process (RGO), fir wood capillary (wood lumen) skeleton with RGO conductive layers (RGO/Fe3+/wood) endows wood with decent anisotropic conductive. Compared with the untreated wood slice, the conductivity of RGO/Fe3+/wood slice is significantly increased. Besides, RGO/Fe3+/wood has been proved to be an effective substrate of Au catalyst as electrode in electrochemical reduction of CO2, which is superior to commercial carbon paper. Conductive wood slice modified by RGO shows potential application prospects in the fields of good mechanical strength required and flexible wood-derived functional devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, solar water evaporation system by utilizing wood-based photothermal material has drawn a lot of attention and displayed promising practical application prospect. However, challenges still remain in terms of its relatively low efficiency. Here, a facile, cost-efficient, and scalable method was proposed to prepare porous silicon loaded wood (porous silicon/wood) as solar steam generation device for seawater desalination. The porous silicon, which was obtained from in situ acid etching of Al-Si alloy powder, could be firmly deposited on the wood surface via capillary infiltration method. It provides an excellent light-absorber layer to enhance its light absorption properties, which is beneficial for broad solar absorption. Meanwhile, the hierarchical porous structure based on natural balsa wood contributes to vapor escape. The evaporation rate of porous silicon/wood reaches 1.57 kg m−2 h−1 under 1 sun illumination with 95.8% solar conversion efficiency. In addition, the simulated seawater desalination test results show that the concentration of various ions in seawater decreases significantly by using porous silicon/wood as solar-thermal material, which meets the WHO water quality standard. In addition, porous silicon/wood shows decent salt-tolerance for high-salinity brine desalination. This study provides a simple method to manufacture high-efficiency solar steam generator, which has potential for future large-scale applications. On the other hand, capillary infiltration method gives an effective strategy for wood asymmetrical modification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wastewater pollution is a worldwide concern, and wastewater treatment is gaining growing global attention. Electro-Fenton is a promising method for the treatment of wastewater containing organic pollutants. This work offers an overview and bibliometric analysis of research on electro-Fenton treatment of wastewater. The literatures, consisting of 1898 documents from 2000 to 2021 collected from the Web of Science database, were analyzed using bibliometric tools such as Bibliometrix package, CiteSpace, and VOSviewer. Document types, publication trends, subject categories, journals, institutions, countries, authors, keywords, and highly cited papers were analyzed. Research in this field has undergone three stages with the rapid development in the past 5 years. Environmental Sciences (24.42%) is the leading Web of Science category, and Engineering (48.37%) is the leading research area. China (38.46%) is the most productive country, followed by Spain (8.59%), Iran (8.11%), France (6.27%), and India (5.80%), while University of Barcelona (7.38%) is the most productive institute. Enric Brillas is the leading author and has the most publications (120 papers) and the highest h-index (58). The top five clusters include "landfill leachate", "heterogeneous electro-Fenton", "electrochemical oxidation", "photoelectro-Fenton", and "photocatalytic degradation". With the rapidly growing number of electro-Fenton related studies, novel research interests and feasible large-scale applications, various techniques are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural wood is mainly comprised of numerous long, partially aligned channels which are connected by micropores (such as ray cells, pits) providing high-efficiency nutrient transportation corridor. Here, thin wood veneer (the thickness of 400 μm) was used to design catalytic membrane for water treatment with reversed-tree transport pathways. As filtering direction is nearly perpendicular to wood growth direction, wood veneer possesses abundant sinuous water channels based on partially aligned and interconnected cell lumens which provide long enough micro reaction and suitable water transfer pathways in a greatly reduced thickness. Meanwhile due to a small rotary cutting angle, large number of incisions of vessels and fibers were formed ensuring large inlet area for fluid transport. And mussel-inspired polydopamine (PDA) was used to modify the surface of wood pores with highly active functional groups. Then, Pd nanoparticles could be in situ grown and immobilized onto wood channels via these groups (Pd/PDA/wood veneer). On account of the unique 3D interpenetrating capillary network structure, Pd/PDA/wood veneer shows a highly efficient water treatment for methylene blue (MB) solution. The flux of Pd/PDA/wood veneer can reach 3462 L/(m2h) with high MB removal efficiency (> 95%), meanwhile it shows good mechanical strength and flexibility. The designed thin wood veneer with unique structure exhibits promising results for practical wastewater treatment and even wider applications such as solar-thermal conversion, microreactor design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphene oxide (GO) has been a promising adsorbent to remove dyes, heavy metals and other pollutants from aqueous solutions, due to its huge surface area and rich oxygenic groups. However, one of the major application challenges is the agglomeration of GO layers which greatly affect its adsorption capacity and recycle performance. In this paper, a novel hollowed-out Si microsphere encapsulated by GO layers was developed as a strong and reusable absorbent. Hollowed-out Si microsphere with a dendritic structure was obtained from micron Al–Si alloy powder via acid treatment. Then it can be encapsulated by GO layers via a hydrogen bonding interaction between oxygenic groups from GO and Si–OH/Al–OH from porous Si skeleton. The designed absorbent has excellent adsorption ability for methylene blue and heavy metal ions resulting from the large surface area and oxygen functional groups of unrolled GO sheets. Meanwhile, it shows good reusability for pollutants owing to the spread of GO sheets on the Si skeleton surface which could prevents the aggregation of GO during adsorption process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bamboo with the outstanding properties, such as good mechanical strength, fast growth rate and low growth cost, is considered as one of utilitarian structural nature materials. But bamboo is easy to get mildewed resulting in disfiguration and fungi corrosion. In this work, a facile method was developed to improve the mildew-proofing capability of bamboo. Mussel-inspired polydopamine (PDA) with biomimetic adhesion function and highly active functional groups was employed to immobilize highly-dispersed Ag and TiO2 nanoparticles on the surface of bamboo via an in-situ growth method. Integrating the uniform PDA coating, photocatalytic function of TiO2 nanoparticles and bactericidal role of Ag nanoparticles, the mildew-proofing capability of bamboo is enhanced significantly. The results show a non-covalent interaction is more likely to account for the binding mechanism of PDA to bamboo. And the prepared bamboo samples show good photocatalytic performance and have excellent resistance leachability. Meanwhile, the mildew-proofing property of prepared bamboo sample was greatly improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]