This Special Issue "Biodegradable Materials" features research and review papers concerning recent advances on the development, synthesis, testing and characterisation of biomaterials. These biomaterials, derived from natural and renewable sources, offer a potential alternative to existing non-biodegradable materials with application to the food and biomedical industries amongst many others. In...

The photocatalytic production of hydrogen from aqueous systems is reviewed, stressing the very promising features of the process as an environmentally friendly, perfectly renewable way to produce hydrogen, the ideal fuel for the future. Starting with a brief historical background, the most recent achievements in the field are discussed, both in the development of innovative materials able to ca...

Bing Huang, Hui-Xiong Deng, Hoonkyung Lee, Mina Yoon, Bobby G. Sumpter, Feng Liu, Sean C. Smith, and Su-Huai Wei National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colorado 80401, USA Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831-6493, USA State Key Laboratory for Superlattices and Microstructures, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of S...

Information (electronic and photonic) and renewable energy (solar energy, fuel cells, batteries, etc.) technologies have reached an advanced stage in their development— realizing engineering limits in cost-effective improvement for current technological approaches. The feature sizes of the latest generations of electronic devices are approaching atomic dimensions, interconnect bottlenecks are l...

Two-dimensional (2D) transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD) nanosheets have emerged as a fascinating new class of materials for catalysis. These nanosheets are active for several important catalysis reactions including hydrogen evolution from water. The rich chemistry of TMDs combined with numerous strategies that allow tuning of their electronic properties make these materials very attractive f...

The synthesis, structure, and photocatalytic water splitting performance of two new titania (TiO2)/gold(Au)/Bombyx mori silk hybrid materials are reported. All materials are monoliths with diameters of up to ca. 4.5 cm. The materials are macroscopically homogeneous and porous with surface areas between 170 and 210 m2/g. The diameter of the TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) - mainly anatase with a minor ...

Left: Two 1.0 kW wind turbines supply electricity to the dormatory of the Villa Tehuelche Rural School, a remote boarding school located in southern Chile. FOREWORD A few years ago, during my tenure as the United States ambassador to the small African nations of Rwanda and Lesotho, I was responsible for administering the Ambassador's Self-Help Funds Program. This discretionary grants program, s...

This compendium provides extensions to the research first reported in the December 2005 Wood and Fiber Science Special Issue (WFS 2005) devoted to CORRIM’s Reports on Environmental Performance of Wood Building Materials. The Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM) is a nonprofit research consortium made up of 15 research institutions dedicated to developing comprehens...

Since the realization that global sustainability depends on renewable sources of materials and energy, there has been an ever-increasing need to develop bio-based polymers that are able to replace petroleum-based polymers. Research in this field has shown strong potential in generating high-performance functionalized polymers from plant biomass. With the anticipated large-scale production of li...