ALBERT

Description: Global threats such as climate change, population growth, and rapid urbanization pose a huge future challenge to water management, and, to ensure the ongoing reliability, resilience and sustainability of service provision, a paradigm shift is required. This paper presents an overarching framework that supports the development of strategies for reliable provision of services while explicitly addressing the need for greater resilience to emerging threats, leading to more sustainable solutions. The framework logically relates global threats, the water system (in its broadest sense), impacts on system performance, and social, economic, and environmental consequences. It identifies multiple opportunities for intervention, illustrating how mitigation, adaptation, coping, and learning each address different elements of the framework. This provides greater clarity to decision makers and will enable better informed choices to be made. The framework facilitates four types of analysis and evaluation to support the development of reliable, resilient, and sustainable solutions: “top-down,” “bottom-up,” “middle based,” and “circular” and provides a clear, visual representation of how/when each may be used. In particular, the potential benefits of a middle-based analysis, which focuses on system failure modes and their impacts and enables the effects of unknown threats to be accounted for, are highlighted. The disparate themes of reliability, resilience and sustainability are also logically integrated and their relationships explored in terms of properties and performance. Although these latter two terms are often conflated in resilience and sustainability metrics, the argument is made in this work that the performance of a reliable, resilient, or sustainable system must be distinguished from the properties that enable this performance to be achieved.

Description: Cellulosic materials, including regenerated cellulose, are promising precursors for a variety of carbon materials. However, thermal decomposition, typically accompanying carbonization at high temperatures, hinders cellulosic materials from being efficiently carbonized (i.e., very low carbon yields). Herein, this study presents a new and efficient method for the preparation of porous 2D carbon materials from sheet-like cellulosic materials, such as papers and fabrics, involving a catalyzed chemical reaction at high temperatures without thermal decomposition. Thus, cellulosic materials are treated with sulfonic acid solutions and significantly dehydrated at high temperatures via evaporation of water. As a result, black materials are obtained at a weight near the theoretical carbon content of cellulose and remain in the carbonized materials. The as-obtained porous 2D carbon materials are flexible and suitable for a wide range of applications such as in electrodes and gas absorbents. Carbonized fabrics have good mechanical and electrical properties , and these properties are enhanced by heat-treatments at higher temperatures. In this paper handy porous 2D carbon materials are prepared from MSA-treated sheetlike cellulosic materials via a chemical carbonization method without thermal decomposition at high temperatures.

Description: Graphene oxide flexibly supported MoO 2 porous architectures (MoO 2 /GO) by decomposition of the prepared ammonium molybdate/GO preforms is fabricated. Focused ion beam microscope analysis shows that the inside structures of the architectures strongly depend on the percentages of the GO used as flexible supports: micrometer scale MoO 2 particulates growing on the GO (micrometer MoO 2 /GO), 3D honeycomb-like nanoarchitectures (MoO 2 /GO nanohoneycomb), and layered MoO 2 /GO architectures are achieved at the percentage of GO at 4.3, 15.2, and 20.8 wt%, respectively. The lithium storage performance of the MoO 2 /GO architectures strongly depends on their inside structures. At the current density of 100 mA g −1 , the capacities of the micrometer MoO 2 /GO, MoO 2 /GO nanohoneycomb, and layered MoO 2 /GO remain at 901, 1127, and 967 mAh g −1 after 100 cycles. The average coulombic efficiencies of micrometer MoO 2 /GO, MoO 2 /GO nanohoneycomb, and layered MoO 2 /GO electrodes are 97.6%, 99.3%, and 99.0%. Moreover, the rate performance shows even cycled at a high current density of 5000 mA g −1 , the MoO 2 /GO nanohoneycomb can deliver the capacity as high as 461 mAh g −1 . The MoO 2 /GO nanohoneycomb exhibits best performance attributed to its unique nanohoneycomb structure constructed with ultrafine MoO 2 fixed on the GO flexible supports. MoO 2 /graphene oxide (GO) architectures are achieved by decomposition of the prepared ammonium molybdate/GO preforms. The nanohoneycomb-like nanoarchitectures are achieved at the optimized ratio with high MoO 2 loading 84.8 wt%. The Li-ion storage capability is significantly improved attributed to their unique nanohoneycomb architectures constructed with ultrafine MoO 2 fixed on the GO flexible supports.

Description: This study describes a novel sustainable concept for the scalable direct fabrication and functionalization of nanocellulose from wood pulp with reduced energy consumption. A central concept is the use of metal-free small organic molecules as mediators and catalysts for the production and subsequent versatile surface engineering of the cellulosic nanomaterials via organocatalysis and click chemistry. Here, “organoclick” chemistry enables the selective functionalization of nanocelluloses with different organic molecules as well as the binding of palladium ions or nanoparticles. The nanocellulosic material is also shown to function as a sustainable support for heterogeneous catalysis in modern organic synthesis (e.g., Suzuki cross-coupling transformations in water). The reported strategy not only addresses obstacles and challenges for the future utilization of nanocellulose (e.g., low moisture resistance, the need for green chemistry, and energy-intensive production) but also enables new applications for nanocellulosic materials in different areas. A novel sustainable concept for the scalable direct fabrication and functionalization of nanocellulose from wood pulp with reduced energy consumption is presented. A central concept is the use of metal-free small organic molecules as mediators and catalysts for the production and subsequent versatile surface engineering of the cellulosic nanomaterials via organocatalysis and click chemistry.