An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

The Self-Organizing Map

Electrochemical wastewater and soil treatments are exciting set of technologies that has been well-studied over the recent years as one of the most-effective remediation techniques for the removal of hazardous pollutants from liquids effluents and soil. The main requirement of these technologies is electricity and their sustainability can be largely improved if they are powered by renewable energy sources. Likewise, this green energy powering can help to apply these technologies in remote areas, such as rural communities in developing countries, where no electricity grid is available. This review presents a comprehensive discussion on fundamental concepts and applications of renewable energy driven electrochemical technologies for treating hazardous pollutants in wastewater and contaminated soils. In the first section, the fundamentals of different electrochemical remediation technologies are presented, whereas the next two sections focused on the most applied technologies for powering these electrochemical devices: the solar photovoltaic (PV) (Section 3) and the wind turbines (Section 4). After that, the non-near future is faced with the study of the principles of biomass energy production and how bioelectrochemical systems are starting to be evaluated for powering electrochemical technologies (Section 5). Then, new approaches in the renewable energy driven electrochemical technologies such as triboelectric nanogenerators and photocatalytic fuel cells are described in Section 6. The last section focused on the challenges expected for the near future, describing the most promising storage system and evaluating the scale-up, environmental and economic concerns of the technologies studied in this work.

Renewable energies driven electrochemical wastewater/soil decontamination technologies: A critical review of fundamental concepts and applications

Recent advances on photocatalytic fuel cell for environmental applications-The marriage of photocatalysis and fuel cells.

Thermal performance predictions for an HFE-7000 direct flow boiling cooled battery thermal management system for electric vehicles

Flow regime identification of swirling gas-liquid flow with image processing technique and neural networks

In this work, an optofluidics based micro-photocatalytic fuel cell with a membrane-free and air-breathing mode was proposed to greatly enhance the cell performance. The incorporation of the optofluidic technology into a photocatalytic fuel cell not only enlarges the specific illumination and reaction area but also enhances the photon and mass transfer, which eventually boosts the photocatalytic reaction rate. Our results show that this new photocatalytic fuel cell yields a much higher performance in converting organics into electricity. A maximum power density of 0.58 mW cm−2 was achieved. The degradation performance of this new optofluidic micro-photocatalytic fuel cell was also evaluated and the maximum degradation efficiency reached 83.9%. In short, the optofluidic micro-photocatalytic fuel cell developed in this work shows promising potential for simultaneously degrading organic pollutants and generating electricity.

Guanyi Wang

Papers

Optofluidics based micro-photocatalytic fuel cell for efficient wastewater treatment and electricity generation.

Experimental study of interfacial characteristics of vertical upward air-water two-phase flow in 25.4 mm ID round pipe

High surface area optofluidic microreactor for redox mediated photocatalytic water splitting

Wave structure and velocity in vertical upward annular two-phase flow

Flow structure of bubbly to slug transition flow in a small pipe