Carbon is a key component in current electrochemical energy storage (EES) devices and plays a crucial role in the improvement in energy and power densities for the future EES devices. As the simplest carbon and the basic unit of all sp² carbons, graphene is widely used in EES devices because of its fascinating and outstanding physicochemical properties; however, when assembled in the macroscale, graphene-derived materials do not demonstrate their excellence as individual sheets mostly because of unavoidable stacking. This review proposal shows to engineer graphene nanosheets from the nano- to the macroscale in a well-designed and controllable way and discusses how the performance of the graphene-derived carbons depends on the individual graphene sheets, nanostructures, and macrotextures. Graphene-derived carbons in EES applications are comprehensively reviewed with three representative devices, supercapacitors, lithium-ion batteries, and lithium-sulfur batteries. The review concludes with a comment on the opportunities and challenges for graphene-derived carbons in the rapidly growing EES research area.

Full-text：https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41918-018-0006-z

Over the past several decades, extensive eforts have been undertaken to fnd methods to synthesize advanced electrocatalysts that possess rationally controllable sizes, shapes, crystallinities, compositions and structures for efcient energy conversion technologies. Of these methods, the one-pot seedless synthetic method in aqueous solution at ambient temperature has attracted extensive attention from researchers because it is a simple, inexpensive, energy-efcient, safe and less toxic method for the synthesis of electrocatalytic nanomaterials. In this review, recent developments in one-pot seedless synthetic strategies for the design of various structures of Au, Pt, Pd, Ag and multimetallic nanocrystals in aqueous solutions at ambient temperatures will be introduced, primarily focusing on the structure-electrocatalytic performance relationships of the as-prepared metal nanocrystals. Current challenges and outlooks for future research directions will also be provided in this promising research feld.

Full-text：https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41918-018-0018-8