Nanostructured Functional Hydrogels as an Emerging Platform for Advanced Energy Technologies

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 modify their molecular architectures enable nanostructured functional hydrogels to address several critical challenges in advanced energy technologies. Integrating the intrinsic or extrinsic properties of various functional materials, nanostructured functional hydrogels hold the promise to break the limitations of current materials, improving the device performance of energy storage and conversion. Here, the focus is on the fundamentals and applications of nanostructured functional hydrogels in energy conversion and storage. Specifically, the recent advances in rational synthesis and modification of various hydrogel-derived functional nanomaterials as core components in batteries, supercapacitors, and catalysts are summarized, and the perspective directions of this emerging class of materials are also discussed.