The bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) polymer solar cell (PSC) has been considered as one of the most promising next-generation photovoltaic technologies. Electron-accepting material, which is the key component as important as polymer donor in the BHJ blend of a PSC, can almost only choose from fullerene derivatives before 2015. Currently, nonfullerene acceptor (NFA) materials are attracting drastically increasing interest in organic photovoltaics as alternatives for fullerene derivatives, due to their advantages of structural diversity, low-cost, as well as extraordinary chemical, thermal, and photostability. Benefiting from the facile functionalization of NFA molecules, their photoelectric properties and stacking characteristics can be adequately adjusted to promote photoinduced charge separation and extraction. In recent five years, a lot of NFA molecules have been successfully designed and synthesized, and the power conversion efficiencies of NFA-based PSCs have reached ~13%, revealing the great potential of NFA-material for improving PSCs performances. In this review, the summary and discussion are focused on the molecular architecture and device performance of three types of NFAs materials including PDI-based acceptors, A-D-A and A-π-D-π-A conjugated acceptors, aiming to understand the structure-property relationship.

Functionalized ionic liquids (ILs) are the most promising approaches to achieve high performing CO₂ capture. This mini-review outlines some important progress for functionalized ILs in CO₂ capture. Ami-no-functionalized ILs exhibit high reactivity with CO₂, and their careful structural design is able to produce high absorption capacity of CO₂. The introduction of intra-molecular hydrogen bonding/proton transfer in ami-no-functionalized ILs is an attractive approach to avoid the formation of intermolecular hydrogen bonded networks generally occurred in traditional amino-functionalized ILs, thus resulting in enhanced absorption capacity of CO₂ and improved uptake rate. Non-amino anion-functionalized ILs such as substituted azolide or phenolate ILs show great potential for rapid and reversible uptake of CO₂ due to their lack of hydrogen bonding, controllable absorption enthalpy and excellent stability. However, there is still a long way to go to construct high performing systems based on functionalized ILs including high capacity of CO₂, rapid absorption kinetics and excellent cycling life. Smart strategies such as dual-tuning methods, multi-site cooperative interactions, and intra-molecular hydrogen bonding/proton transfer would promote the development of CO₂ capture in functionalized ILs significantly.

Layered inorganic compounds are potential flame retardant materials with good flame retardant performance. In particular, inorganic composites or inorganic-organic hybrids may be a promising candidate of flame re-tardants. This review introduces the thermal stability, flame retardancy, smoke suppression and their mecha-nism of layered inorganic-based flame retardants. The results indicate that the incorporation of layered in-organic based flame retardants can improve the thermal stability and residual yield at high temperature, flame retardancy and smoke suppression. The improved flame retardancy and smoke suppression performances were mainly ascribed to layered inorganic based flame retardants with excellent lamellar barrier effect and outstanding catalytic carbonization performance, which was propitious to form compact and stiff carbonaceous ceramic layer, and suppressed efficiently the heat and mass transmission between polymer nanocomposites and flame zone.

Chemical activation of carbon materials is critical to modify their textural and surface properties in an effort to optimize their supercapacitive performance as electrode materials for supercapacitors. This present work investigates the effects of nitric acid activation on the textural, surface, and supercapacitive properties of ul-tra-small carbon nanospheres with a uniform size of 24 nm synthesized through a unique catalytic emulsion polymerization strategy. Nitric acid activation has been undertaken at different temperatures for various time. The effects of these two activation parameters have been systematically examined, with some important cor-relations established. The optimum activation conditions for achieving the best supercapacitive performance in different aqueous electrolytes have been identified.