Ji-Woong Bae

Energy and water are of fundamental importance for our modern society, and advanced technologies on sustainable energy storage and conversion as well as water resource management are in the focus of intensive research worldwide. Beyond their traditional biological applications, hydrogels are emerging as an appealing materials platform for energy- and water-related applications owing to their attractive and tailorable physiochemical properties. In this review, we highlight the highly tunable synt

Abstract Solid‐state electrolytes have emerged as a promising alternative to existing liquid electrolytes for next generation Li‐ion batteries for better safety and stability. Of various types of solid electrolytes, composite polymer electrolytes exhibit acceptable Li‐ion conductivity due to the interaction between nanofillers and polymer. Nevertheless, the agglomeration of nanofillers at high concentration has been a major obstacle for improving Li‐ion conductivity. In this study, we designed a

Precisely controlled distribution of energy in solar-to-thermal energy conversion systems could allow for enhanced energy utilization. Light-absorbing hydrogels provide a means for evaporating water by using solar energy, yet targeted delivery of solar thermal energy to power the water evaporation process remains challenging. Here, we report a light-absorbing sponge-like hydrogel (LASH) that is created by <i>in situ</i> gelation of a light-absorbing nanoparticle-modified polymer, leading to syne

Nanostructured materials are critically important in many areas of technology because of their unusual physical/chemical properties due to confined dimensions. Owing to their intrinsic hierarchical micro-/nanostructures, unique chemical/physical properties, and tailorable functionalities, hydrogels and their derivatives have emerged as an important class of functional materials and receive increasing interest from the scientific community. Bottom-up synthetic strategies to rationally design and

Abstract Lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries are considered as a promising candidate for next‐generation energy‐storage devices due to their high energy density, low cost, and ecofriendliness. However, the practical application of Li–S batteries faces challenges arising from the cathode, the electrolyte, and the anode, including the intrinsically low conductivity of sulfur and lithium sulfide (Li 2 S), the high solubility of polysulfides in the electrolytes commonly used, and the dendrite growth of

Effective and dense Li plating/stripping by suppressing free solvents from intermolecular dipole–dipole interaction between a polar polymer &amp; solvents, resulting in high-performance Li-metal batteries.

Abstract Li metal is the most ideal anode material to assemble rechargeable batteries with high energy density. However, nonuniform Li‐ion flux during repeated Li plating and stripping leads to continuous Li dendrite growth and dead Li formation, which causes safety risks and short lifetime and thus impedes the commercialization of Li metal batteries. Here, parallelly aligned holey nanosheets on a Li metal anode are reported to simultaneously redistribute the Li‐ion flux in the electrolyte and i

Mg²⁺ electroplating has been an obstacle for Mg metal batteries due to the passivating nature of Mg metal. Here, a unique current collector based on an amorphous MgO-wrapped Zn-skeleton enabled Mg²⁺ electroplating for a high-voltage Mg metal battery.

All-solid-state batteries are promising energy storage systems as a power source for future electric applications. However, the solid electrolytes have suffered from oxidative vulnerability at the catalytic cathode's surface, particularly at the high-voltage charging process. The poor charge transport and the contact issue at the electrolyte/electrode interface also hamper fully utilizing high-energy-density batteries. In this work, a general design of a high-concentration polymeric interlayer i

Abstract Solid‐state electrolytes have emerged as a promising alternative to existing liquid electrolytes for next generation Li‐ion batteries for better safety and stability. Of various types of solid electrolytes, composite polymer electrolytes exhibit acceptable Li‐ion conductivity due to the interaction between nanofillers and polymer. Nevertheless, the agglomeration of nanofillers at high concentration has been a major obstacle for improving Li‐ion conductivity. In this study, we designed a

Grain boundaries are known to block ionic conduction across grain boundaries in oxide ion conductors due to adjacent space charge layers. Since the positively charged grain boundary core is intensified with a high local concentration of defects such as oxygen vacancies, uniform distribution of a dopant may mitigate the formation of space charge layers and enhance the ionic conductivity. To investigate the dopant segregation effect on the space charge layer and ionic conductivity, we provided the