20^th International Conference on Advanced Energy Materials and Research August 13-14, 2018 Dublin, Ireland

Biography:

Xiaodong Li is a Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Professor at the University of Virginia with expertise and interests including nanomaterial-enabled energy systems, biological and bio-inspired materials and devices, additive manufacturing, smart manufacturing, biomechanics, micro/nanomechanics, surface engineering, and tribology. His stature in the field of his expertise includes over 230 peer-reviewed journal articles in prestigious journals such as Science, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, and Advanced Energy Materials; over 12,000 citations with H-index of 54; TMS MPMD Distinguished Scientist/Engineer Award (2015), Professional Engineering Publisher's PE Prize (2008); over 80 invited plenary lectures/keynotes/talks at international conferences/workshops; Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME); and Fellow of the Society of Experimental Mechanics (SEM). His breakthrough work has been featured by over 1,000 media outlets worldwide including BBC, Discovery News, Science Daily, and MSNBC. His innovation on cotton textile based composites was recently selected by New York Times – Year in Ideas for Year 2010.

Abstract:

With increasing energy and environment concerns, how to efficiently convert and store energy has become a critical topic. Electrochemical energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors and batteries, have been proven to be the most effective energy conversion and storage technologies for practical application. Supercapacitors and lithium-based batteries are particularly promising because of their excellent power density and energy density. However, further development of these energy storage devices is hindered by their poor electrode performance. The carbon materials in supercapacitors and batteries, such as graphite, activated carbons and various nanostructured carbon materials (ordered porous carbon, CNT, graphene etc.), are often derived from nonrenewable resources under relatively harsh environments. Naturally abundant biomass with hierarchically porous architecture is a green, alternative carbon source with many desired properties for supercapacitors and lithium-based batteries.  Recently, we converted cotton, banana peel, and recycled paper into highly porous, conductive activated carbon scaffolds for advanced energy storage applications via a low-cost and high throughput manufacturing process. The activated carbon scaffolds were further coated with active materials such as NiCo₂O₄, NiO, Co-Al layered double hydroxides (Co-Al LDHs), Ni₂S, sulfur nanoparticles, and graphene to enhance their electrochemical properties. The biomass-derived activated carbon materials are effective in improving supercapacitor’s energy density and in blocking the dissolution of reaction intermediates in lithium sulfur batteries. Especially, the biomass-derived carbons provide scaffolds for hosting sulfur in lithium sulfur batteries to manipulate the “shuttle effects” of polysulfides and improve the utilization of sulfur.  In particular, the activated carbon textiles (derived from cotton textiles) are flexible and conductive, and an ideal substrate for constructing flexible supercapacitors, batteries, and self-powered flexible solar cell/supercapacitor (or battery) systems. Using biomasses is definitely the right track towards making renewable carbon materials for future energy storage devices.

Biography:

J.A. Szpunar, joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan in August 2009, as Tier I Canada Research Chair. He came from McGill University where he was Professor of Materials Science and Birks Chair in Metallurgy. His research interests extend to various areas of materials related investigations. More recently his research has focused on environmentally friendly energy generation, in particular the extraction and purification of hydrogen, accident tolerant nuclear fuel and research on advanced materials for Generation IV nuclear reactors. His research supports also various clean energy programs and research on more safe and secure materials for oil and gas transportation. Dr Szpunar has a strong record of research productivity. 40 PhD students and 27 MSc. students graduated under his supervision.  He is an author and co-author of more than 900 research papers.

Abstract:

Hydrogen has been recognized as a clean and sustainable fuel. However still many problems have to be to be solved in area of generation, transport and storage of this fuel for future hydrogen based economy to be realized. Some of our research in this area will be presented.

Reaction of water with activated aluminum powder is consider as one of the methods to generate hydrogen. The reaction produces also aluminum hydroxide (Al (OH)₃ or AlOOH) as the byproduct; these compounds change to alumina (Al₂O₃) after calcination process, and alumina can produce aluminum [1, 2]. Hydrogen production rate can be increased if effective surface area of aluminum exposed to oxidation is increased. We found that microstructural refinement can be used to promote the reaction and allow major increase of the production of hydrogen. The addition of water soluble salts (potash or salt) also allow to increase the oxidation rate and hydrogen generation. However, we established that presence of salt has smaller influence than microstructural modifications.

The storage of hydrogen will also require structural modification of the storage system. One of storage system that was developed by our team will be discussed [3]. We designed a Pd-graphene composite for hydrogen storage with spherical shaped nanoparticles of 45 nm size homogeneously distributed over a graphene substrate. This new hydrogen storage system has attractive features like high gravimetric density, ambient conditions of hydrogen charge and low temperature of the hydrogen discharge. The palladium particles produce a low activation energy barrier to dissociate Plenarythis helps delaying the formation of metallic clusters and can improve hydrogen storage in metal graphene systems.

Biography:

Hyoyoung Lee has completed his PhD at Department of Chemistry, University of Mississippi, USA in 1997. He did his Postdoctoral studies at North Carolina State University. He worked at Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and then moved to Department of Chemistry, Sungkyunkwan University as a full Professor. He served as a Director of National Creative Research Initiatives. Currently, he has served as an Associate Director of Centre for Integrated Nanostructure Physics, Institute of Basic Science. His current research area is 0-2D semiconducting materials and their devices. He has written more than 140 journal articles in top-tier journals and has been serving as an Editorial Board Member of Scientific Reports.

Abstract:

A control of the energy bandgap of semicondunding metarials including  transtion metal chalcogenides (TMCs) including TiO₂, MoS₂, and CoS₂ have been paid attention for energy conversion and environmental issues. Herein, we like to introduce new findings about the visible-light driven blue TiO₂ materials for photo-catalytic hydrogen evolving reaction (HER) and for an application to remove algae from water.^1,2

In addition, we like to report new layered ternary transition metal chalcogenides (TTMCs) material to overcome to the limitation of active sites which is challenging in binary transition metal chalcogenides (BTMC) such as MoS₂ towards electrochemical hydrogen production. The TTMC, Cu₂MoS₄ has been successfully synthesized by a facile solution-processed method. Moreover, by anion doping such as Se in as the synthesized Cu₂MoS₄, it has been found that TTMC can be exfoliated into single layer nanosheets and the single layered TTMC exhibits the highest electrocatalytic activity towards HER.³

We also report an advanced bi-functional hybrid electrocatalyst for both oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER), which is composed of WS2 and CNT connected via tungsten carbide (WC) bonding. WS₂ sheets on the surface of CNTs provide catalytic active sites for electrocatalytic activity while the CNTs act as conduction channels and provide a large surface area. We found that four to five layers of WS₂ sheets on the surface of CNTs produces excellent catalytic activity towards both ORR and OER, which is comparable to noble metals (Pt, RuO₂, etc.). Our findings show the many advantages enabled by designing highly-active, durable, and cost-effective ORR and OER electrocatalysts.⁴

Finally, we like to demonstrate new strategy to satisfy all requirements for the development of a highly active and remarkably durable HER electrocatalyst in both acidic and alkaline media via anion-cation double substitution into a CoS₂ moiety for preparing 3D mesoporous pyrite-metal vanadium-cobalt phosphorsulphide (Co_1-xV_xSP).⁵