Wood for energy and high temperature emerging technology

Wood for energy

Sustainable energy requires carbon recycling. Wood captures CO₂ from atmosphere and converts it into biomass. Combining its many economic and environmental benefit, wood provides a unique framework of selection for sustainable nanomaterials for energy management and conversion. In this seminar, we will take a glimpse of the immense opportunities offered by wood across diverse length scale from energy efficient buildings, water-energy nexus, to photon and phonon engineering, nanofluidics and ion/molecular regulation. Especially, when the channel reduces to sub-nm, new physics and transport mechanism arises which was utilized to achieve a record high ionic thermoelectric performance.

High temperature emerging technology

The high temperature synthesis (up to 3300 K) enabled by joule heating of carbon-based substrate opens a new paradigm of nanomaterials. In this seminar, I will talk about the heat recovery in a temperature region higher than 1300 K, where the current methods have been limited. We have developed a carbon-based all-in-one radiation receiver and thermoelectric device as well as a series of thermoelectric characterization techniques up to 3000 K. Enabled by the controllable heating profile toward guided synthesis, many new and exciting scientific discoveries on the correlations between high temperature synthesis-structure-properties await.