Biomimetic smart nanochannels for power harvesting

With the increasing requirements of reliable and environmentally friendly energy resources, porous materials for sustainable energy conversion technologies have attracted intensive interest in the past decades. As an important block of porous materials, biomimetic smart nanochannels (BSN) have been developed rapidly into an attractive field for their well-tunable geometry and chemistry. With inspiration from nature, many works have been reported to utilize BSN to harvest clean energy. In this review, we summarize recent progress in the BSN for power harvesting from four parts of brief introduction of BSN, biological prototypes for power harvesting, BSN-based energy conversion, and conclusion and outlook. Overall, by learning from nature, exploiting new avenues and improving the performance of BSN, a number of exciting developments in the near future may be anticipated.