Artículos SCI

The rising adverse effects of climate change call for a rapid shift to low-carbon energy and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. For that, biorefineries appear as promising alternatives to produce energy, chemicals, and fuels using biomass and waste as raw materials. Here, we review catalytic aqueous-phase reforming to convert biomass and organic waste carbohydrates into renewable hydrogen, with focus on reforming basics; catalyst design; reforming of model compounds, wastewater and biomass; economics and life cycle assessment. We found that platinum and palladium are technically highly effective, yet their high price may limit upscaling. Alternatively, addition of tin to nickel gives acceptable results and improves hydrogen selectivity from 35 to 90%. We observed that hydrogen production decreases from 14% for crude glycerol to 2% for pure glycerol, thus highlighting the need to do experiments with real wastewater. The rare experiments on real wastewater from brewery, juice, tuna, and cheese industries have given hydrogen production rates of up to 149.7 mg/L. Aqueous-phase reforming could be shortly competitive with prices around 3-6 USD per kg of hydrogen, which are nearing the current market prices of 2-3 USD per kg.

Herein a versatile and scalable method to prepare periodically corrugated nanophosphor surface patterns displaying strongly polarized and directional visible light emission is demonstrated. A combination of inkjet printing and soft lithography techniques is employed to obtain arbitrarily shaped light emitting motifs. Such predesigned luminescent drawings, in which the polarization and angular properties of the emitted light are determined and finely tuned through the surface relief, can be used as anti-counterfeiting labels, as these two specific optical features provide additional means to identify any unauthorized or forged copy of the protected item. The potential of this approach is exemplified by processing a self-standing photoluminescent quick response code whose emission is both polarized and directionally beamed. Physical insight of the mechanism behind the directional out-coupled photoluminescence observed is provided by finite-difference time-domain calculations.