Principles and Requirements of Battery Membranes: Ensuring Efficiency and Safety in Energy Storage

This critical review highlights the latest improvements and special features regarding the membrane separators available for lead-acid, alkaline, metal-metal, metal-gas, and metal-ion batteries such as lithium-ion. In the recent years, there has been a surge in the intensive work aimed at developing innovative separators for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, for example, electric vehicles (EVs), portable electronics and for energy storage in power grid. The separator finds itself in a very important place as it provides physical separation between two electrodes. It also acts as an electrical insulator. This separator is known as an electrolyte gateway which helps the movement of ions during charge/discharge cycles. This review addresses the requirements for battery separators and explains the structure and properties of various types of membrane separators; there are several types of membranes such as microporous membranes, modified microporous membranes, nonwoven mats, composite membranes and electrolyte membranes. Similarly, each type of separator has inherent advantages and disadvantages which in turn directly affects the performance of batteries. This review article systematically deals with the structures and working principle of separators, properties and main requirements and their characterization method of separators, generation, improvements, and function assessments of these separators. Furthermore, this study also enlightens the emerging research path and future prospects.&nbsp

Revolutionizing Oil Extraction: Lechinysin's Potential in Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery as a Biosurfactant

As conventional oil recovery techniques have numerous deficiencies in oil recovery rate (up to 40% OOIP), process safety, financial aspects, sustainability and environmental impacts other efficient techniques like MEOR had been invented that utilize microbes or their metabolites like biosurfactants to enhance oil recovery process from depleted reservoirs and increase the recovery rate up to 50% of remained oil in the reservoirs. Biosurfactants are the interesting chemicals that encompass a large group of compounds with unique properties to play crucial role in improving oil recovery. Among biosurfactants, lichenysin produced by B. lichenoformis or B. mojavensis Jf-2 and it has several different variants based on the producing strains. It is an alternative candidate with amazing features like stability in extremely high temperature up to 140 °C, saving its optimal activity in a wide range of pH values from 6 up to 10 pH, high salinity up to 10% NaCl concentration, and a significant CMC from 10 to 20 mg/L that is the lowest CMC among studied biosurfactants suitable for MEOR. All these characteristics indicate its signifance as a biosurfactant that has the capability to revolutionize the MEOR technique in the future.&nbsp

An Overview of Oil Recovery Techniques: From Primary to Enhanced Oil Recovery Methods

As we all know, numerous methods have been invented for better managing of the reservoirs to recover the trapped oil from them as much as possible. These techniques included primary techniques that were implemented primarily at the beginning of this industry. As these techniques were not effective enough, secondary techniques, like; water flooding and gas injection methods were created and the amount of recovered oil were increased, as well. On the contrary, the demand for more oil was raised up and it was felt that much more effective techniques are necessary. It resulted to creation of Enhanced Oil Recovery Techniques and these techniques are included; thermal methods (steam injection, steam assisted gravity drainage and in-situ combustion), Chemical methods (alkali flooding, surfactant flooding, polymer flooding, foam flooding, and combination of alkali-surfactant-polymer flooding), and microbial EOR. The most promising technique is microbial EOR because of being cost-effective and ecofriendly. GEMEOR (Genetically Engineered MEOR) and EEOR (Enzyme Enhanced Oil Recovery) are two new trends of MEOR that own potential hopes in petroleum industry

Investigations of Activated Carbon from Different Natural Sources for Preparation of Binder-Free Few-Walled CNTs/Activated Carbon Electrodes

In this study, we present another approach to fabricating high-performance supercapacitor electrodes by combining activated carbon particles with carbon nanotubes (AC/CNT). We synthesized activated carbon from diverse biomass sources using a carbonization process and chemical activation with KOH. By incorporating carbon nanotubes, we significantly augmented the electrode’s surface area, resulting in exceptional ion transport and a substantial increase in specific capacitance. Our investigation reveals that the optimized composition, 85:10:5 of AC, CNT, and conductive additive, achieved outstanding specific capacitance values, notably 125.6 F g−1 at 1 mV s−1 and 118 F g−1 at 1 A g−1, along with a maximum energy density of 4 Wh kg−1. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) further demonstrated the superior charge transfer capabilities of these electrodes, notably at a frequency range from 100 kHz to 10 mHz. Additionally, our research highlights the influence of different biomass precursors, such as apricot kernels, walnut shells, and rice husks, on the electrochemical behavior of these electrodes. Overall, this study provides valuable insights into the development of high-performance supercapacitors, emphasizing the potential of diverse biomass sources in optimizing electrode materials