Alternative Energy Advantages

The environmental pollution and energy crisis are both severe challenges faced by human society due to rapidly increasing energy demand and huge combustion of fossil fuels. Scientists think that the conventional notions of energy generation and conversion are not suitable for sustainable development in the world1.Therefore, a great deal of research has been performed to explore clean and renewable energy sources as well as their devices. Among these various energy systems, direct ethanol fuel cells (DEFCs) have been widely studied as ideal energy converters that convert chemical energy of ethanol directly to electrical energy2. In addition, ethanol is low cost and is in principle renewable when resourced from biomass. In comparison to pure hydrogen and methanol, ethanol possesses several important advantages:

The graphite rod was inserted as anode into the ionic liquid (IL)/water solution, placed parallel to the Pt wire as counter-electrode with a separation of 1 cm and the ionic liquid urea choline chloride was mixed with water at 1:1 ratio. Using a DC power supply the potentials of 5 V were applied to the two electrodes. The exfoliation products were washed with water and surfactant until the pH became neutral and the products were separated by filter and ultra-centrifugation at 10,000 rmp at 25 ºC2.

2.2 Preparation of SRGO Synthesis of SRGO was carried out using the method described by He et al.24 and the process of SRGO production is shown in Fig. 1. (NH4)2SO4 and GO with a mass ratio of 1:5 were mixed and dispersed in deionized water. The mixture was thoroughly dispersed by sonication for 30 min, most of the water was subsequently evaporated under reduced pressure in a rotary evaporator. The resultant mixture was completely dried by lyophilization, and then the solid was heated at 235ºC for 30 min under flowing N2.

2.3 Synthesis of SRGO-supported