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The 2022′s Youth Forum on Resources Chemicals and Materials was held on November 12–13, 2022, in Shenyang, Liaoning Province. Panel discussions focus on the cutting-edge researches on “Fine chemicals and advanced alloy materials” and “Utilization of fossil and renewable carbon resources”. This perspective summarizes the major directions of scientific research and technical developments aligned in the discussions. Fine chemical industry tends to pursue green and low-carbon products, intelligent product design, and start manufacturing. In recent years, great efforts have been made for transformation of cellulose into advanced electronic as well as life-service bio-materials and to the high-selectivity extraction of bio-base aromatic chemicals from lignin. Concerning high-end alloy materials, regulating deformation mechanism of crystal to construct bimodal microstructure seems highly prospective in harmonizing precipitate hardening effect and plastic deformation capacity. As we know, utilization of fossil carbon resources constitutes the major anthropogenic carbon emissions, and the related innovations thus should be, for possibly a long period, on increasing energy production efficiency and low-carbon cascaded conversion of fossil fuels, especially of coal.

In order to resolve the global crisis of fossil energy shortage and climate warming, the development of efficient energy storage devices is a significant topic at present. Supercapacitors as the novel type of energy storage devices have the unique advantages, including the fast charging/discharging behaviors, high-energy/power density, and stable cycling performance. Compared with traditional supercapacitors, flexible supercapacitors are environmentally friendly, light weight, small size and high safety. Therefore, flexible supercapacitors have a wide application prospect in emerging electronic devices. Due to its flexibility, biocompatibility, and structure designability, cellulose and its gel materials are gradually used as electrodes, separators and electrolytes in flexible supercapacitors. Several construction processes at molecular scale for high-performance cellulose gels are summarized. Meanwhile, this review covers the recent progress of developing the flexible supercapacitors and all-in-one supercapacitors based on cellulose functional gels. We finally discussed the potential challenges and opportunities for cellulose and its derived materials in new-style flexible supercapacitors and other electronic devices.

The technical bottleneck of carbon materials as counter electrodes (CEs) lies in their limited electrical conductivity, extended ion diffusion paths, poor dispersion, and high contact resistance. Problem-oriented in-situ self-grown N-doped CNTs-coated Ni nanoparticles based on N-doped carbonaceous structures derived from pitaya peel (PC) are adopted to construct Ni-N-C hybrid 3D ionized network sites (Ni@NCNTs/PC-4) as CEs. Structural characterization, micromorphological and chemical composition analyses revealed the 3D network structure of Ni@NCNTs/PC-4 with abundant active sites. They effectively shorten the diffusion distance of I3− ions with a smaller charge transfer resistance (5.21 Ω) than that of PC (12.53 Ω). DSSCs based on Ni@NCNTs/PC-4 display good optoelectronic properties, in which the short-circuit current density (Jsc) is 13.27 mA/cm2, higher than those of Pt (11.66 mA/cm2) and PC (6.99 mA/cm2). The PCE value (5.13%) of DSSCs based on Ni@NCNTs/PC-4 is also higher than that of DSSCs based on PC (2.47%). Overall, this work provides a preliminary research and new ideas for further in-depth study of biomass-derived 3D structured-carbons that contribute to key electrodes in DSSCs.