SCALE-UP PRODUCTION OF MULTIFUNCTIONAL NANOSTRUCTURED MATERIALS FOR ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT APPLICATIONS

Energy and Environment are the sectors of critical significance and concern to the world. New inventions and improvements in technologies addressing the key challenges in these sectors are rapidly emerging over the past decade. Varieties of engineered functional nanomaterials are playing a vital role in the related fields such as energy harvesting, energy storage, catalysis, water purification/desalination and environmental toxicology etc. In all of these sectors, novel forms of carbon and metal oxide nanostructures have been identified to play a prominent role. Graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs) which are one among the potential carbon based materials and zinc oxide (ZnO) is notably technological material owing to its inherent piezoelectric, semi-conductive, non-toxic and biocompatible properties. Novel hybrid GNP/ZnO nanostructured materials possess intriguing functional properties as they combines the unique physical and chemical properties of both ZnO and Graphene nanomaterials, in addition to their high surface to volume ratio. Therefore, there is a rise in demand for their use in diverse applications related to energy and environment. The unique features of such novel materials can be further tailored by their size, shape, composition, structure, and surface. Hence, it is of utmost importance to develop an environmentally friendly and cost effective production method feasible for large scale production of such engineered multifunctional nanomaterials. The current thesis includes the preparation of the engineered multifunctional nanomaterials with good control over morphology, composition and uniformity through the control of process parameters. Having developed interesting forms of nanomaterials based on semiconductor metal oxides and conductive carbon forms, we explored applications of such multifunctional materials to obtain electroactive piezoelectric/energy harvesting polymer nanocomposites, cultural heritage/environmental, and antimicrobial adhesive dental materials. The strong materials chemistry effort embodied in the stated activities is also strongly supported by advanced physics based characterizations. We are also trying to commercialize this expertise in the particular domain of energy and environment for industrial innovation. Overall, the simplicity, cost-effectiveness and ease of synthesized nanostructured materials with multifunctional properties are ideal candidates for use in energy and environmental applications.