Graphene Platforms for Smart Energy Generation and Storage

Nowadays, energy generation and storage are two important topics. Unfortunately, conventional energy generators are not capable of responding to environmental changes, while traditional energy storage devices lack special functionalities apart from supplying electricity. Benefiting from exceptional physicochemical properties, graphene-based materials help to address the aforementioned issues. In this review, we highlight recent key advances in graphene-based smart energy generation and storage systems. In terms of smart energy generation, we focus on graphene-derived electric generators that can controllably produce electricity in response to external stimuli, such as moisture, flowing liquid, friction, pressure force, and heat. As for energy storage, smart batteries and supercapacitors with made-to-measure graphene materials are summarized to show impressive features of deformability, wearability, printability, stimuli response, self-healing, integration, and miniaturization. Beyond these, we also discuss the challenges ahead for these graphene-related smart energy generation/storage devices and their future development trend.