Functional nanomaterial in energy and environmental science

Nanostructured materials have been in use in various applications in day-to-day life from industries to commercial products and show steady growth for the past 20 years owing to their distinctive physiochemical properties. Even though the nanoparticle can produce both by top-down and bottom-up methods, each has been chosen based on the property defined end applications. The top-down techniques can able to cut down the material size in the range of few hundred nanometers. However, to control the structure of the nanomaterials, “bottom-up” approaches have been widely used, and they give plenty of opportunities to incorporate other functional building blocks and expand the possibility to introduce properties completely different from the base nanoparticles. Organic–inorganic combined structuring as composites or functionalization is able to merge the properties from the host elements and produce unique properties to meet out the existing demands in functional nanomaterials. The functionalization of nanomaterials with organic molecule helps to tune certain properties such as structural, electronic, optical, and magnetic. Generally, a semiconductor with organic molecules has π-bonds, which have excitons that can act as charge carriers and under functionalization with nanoparticle the electrons can move via π-electron cloud overlaps, especially by jumping, tunneling, and related mechanisms, and give the new property to the nanomaterials. In the functionalized nanomaterials, carbon family gives high open way to get the surface functionalized and adapt to the new properties and highly tunable for a lot of applications. This review gives some of the insights on the advantages of utilizing organic molecules functionalized nanomaterials for energy and environmental applications.