Advanced materials and processes for energy and water

Presented by Yun Hu

Abstract

Energy and water play critical roles in all aspects of life. In the recent years, Prof. Hu's group made great efforts to create new materials and processes for the conversion and storage of energy and the purification of water. In this plenary presentation, Prof. Hu will talk about the recent success of his group in creating new processes, which are based on reactions of alkali metals with CO and CO<sub>2</sub>, for synthesis of 3D meso-porous graphene and Na-embedded carbon nano-walls. Those novel nanomaterials are unique electrode materials due to their high electrical conductivity and large accessible surface areas. They exhibited excellent performance as electrodes for various energy devices, including dye-sensitized solar cells, perovskite solar cells, supercapacitors, ion batteries, and fuel cells. Furthermore, those materials were also explored as efficient electrodes of capacitive deionization cells for the desalination of seawater. Those important findings will be discussed in this talk.