Site Li

Projects

Slurry electrode materials for Flow battery.
Flow batteries has attracted wide interests due to their high stabiltiy in long-term energy storage. Current All Vanadium Redox Flow Battery (VRFB) has been developed for decades. But the high cost and deteriorate stability at high/low temperature has hindered the application. In this project, a low-cost iron slurry electrode has been studied to address these issues. Apart from the aqueous flow battery, our electrolyte do not require a high solubility of active materials. Therefore, a ultra-high capacity can be achieved.
Static redox battery
Flow battery requires some energy input to drive the pump for efficient redox reaction. In this project, we take advantages from static redox reactions by employing a novel electrode system. Currently, we have validated the concept and are working on the cell assembly.

Nanocluster/substrate coumpound mateiral for electrochemical catalysis.
Electrochemical catalysis is a promising strategy to produce clean energy fuels from redundant nature resources such as water. Especially the electrochemical water splitting has been extensively studied for the past decades. However, the reaction mechanism is not well understood. In our previous research, it is found that gold nanoclusters, exhibit no obvious catalytic activity themselves though, can boost the electrochemical water oxidation and hydrogen evolution reactions when loaded on CoSe2 and MoS2, respectively. The well resolved Au nanoclusters/substrate system can be an ideal platform to investigate the fundamentals of catalytic reactions.
Nanocluster for CO2 conversion
CO2 is a notorious as a greenhouse gas. Electrochemical conversion of CO2 into valuable fuel products has been promising due to the low cost and high efficency. Au has been extensively used for electrochemical CO2 conversion because of its intrinsic high activity. But the reaction mechanism has not been fully understood. One strategy is using the atomically precise Au nanocluster as catalysts. With the aid of computational simulation, it is promising to reveal the fundamentals behind this opque electrochemical reaction.

Flexible electrode design and synthesis.
Flexible batteries have attracted much attention in recent years due to their promising applications in flexible displays, portable consumer electronic devices, and thin-film-based electronics. However, their practical applications are still limited by their low active material mass-loading in flexible electrodes and poor lithium storage performances. In this project, we used carbon fiber as substrate to synthesize flexible electrode with high massloading. And the obtained electrode materials show superior performance than normal flexible electrode materials.
Carbon network as protecting agent for high performance electrode materials.
Sn/Si are considered as promising electrode materials owing to its ultrahigh capacities. But one great challenge is this type of electrode mateirlas undergo huge volume change during charge/discharge. In this project, we designed several carbon networks to further enhance the conductivity and protect the active materials from collapse. Especially, we proposed a eggette-like nanostrucutre using table salt as template. This structure is proven to effectively boost the performance for both Lithium ion batteries and Sodium ion batteries.

This is my proposed project for my next phase.
Recently, machine learning techniques have been used for traditional chemistry study. One example is using machine learning to screen out potential materials for catalytic reactions. Unlike the traditional chemistry resarch methods, machine learning can save scientists a lot time and resources. And this interdiciplinary project is still yet to be explored.