All-dielectric ultra-broadband transparent imidazole ionic liquid-based metamaterial absorber with a frustum-shaped structure.

In this study, a frustum-shaped addition was made to a cylindrical absorber unit, utilizing 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium dicyanamide ionic liquid (IL) to create a transparent all-dielectric liquid metamaterial absorber (A-D ILMMA). The A-D ILMMA achieved over 90% absorption efficiency across 4.86-50.

Molecular Engineering of Cation Solvation Structure for Highly Selective Carbon Dioxide Electroreduction.

Balancing the activation of H O is crucial for highly selective CO electroreduction (CO RR), as the protonation steps of CO RR require fast H O dissociation kinetics, while suppressing hydrogen evolution (HER) demands slow H O reduction. We herein proposed one molecular engineering strategy to regulate the H O activation using aprotic organic small molecules with high Gutmann donor number as a solvation shell regulator. These organic molecules occupy the first solvation shell of K and accumulate in the electrical double layer, decreasing the H O density at the interface and the relative content of proton suppliers (free and coordinated H O), suppressing the HER.

How do external forces related to mass and charge affect the structures and dynamics of an ionic liquid?

Ionic liquids (ILs) are novel promising materials widely used in various fields. Their structures and properties can be tuned by means of external perturbations, thus further broadening their applications. Herein, forces proportional to atomic mass (mass-related field) and atomic charge (electric field) are applied in molecular dynamics simulations to the IL 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide to investigate the origin of the resulting changes in structures and dynamics.

Photoelectrocatalytic Reduction of CO to Paraffin Using p-n Heterojunctions.

Nowadays, photoelectrocatalytic (PEC) reduction of CO represents a very promising solution for storing solar energy in value-added chemicals, but so far it has been hampered by the lack of highly efficient catalyst of photocathode. Enlightened by the Calvin cycle of plants, here we show that a series of three-dimensional C/N-doped heterojunctions of Zn:Co@Cu are successfully fabricated and applied as photocathodes in the PEC reduction of CO to generate paraffin product. These materials integrate semiconductors of p-type CoO and n-type ZnO on Cu foam to construct fine heterojunctions with multiple active sites, which result in excellent C-C coupling control in reduction of CO.

Flow-induced voltage generation by moving a nano-sized ionic liquids droplet over a graphene sheet: Molecular dynamics simulation.

In this work, the phenomenon of the voltage generation is explored by using the molecular dynamics simulations, which is performed by driving a nano-sized droplet of room temperature ionic liquids moving along the monolayer graphene sheet for the first time. The studies show that the cations and anions of the droplet will move with velocity nonlinearly increasing to saturation arising by the force balance. The traditional equation for calculating the induced voltage is developed by taking the charge density into consideration, and larger induced voltages in μV-scale are obtained from the nano-size simulation systems based on the ionic liquids (ILs) for its enhanced ionic drifting velocities.