Abstract
Energy and water are of fundamental importance for our modern society, and advanced technologies on sustainable energy storage and conversion as well as water resource management are in the focus of intensive research worldwide. Beyond their traditional biological applications, we demonstrate that hydrogels as a powerful material platform can impact many energy- and water-related technologies owing to their attractive and tailorable physiochemical properties. This talk will present an emerging class of polymeric materials we have developed in the past decade: nanostructured multifunctional hydrogels that are hierarchically porous, and structurally tunable in size, shape, composition, hierarchical porosity, and chemical interfaces. These organic gels based on versatile gelation chemistries with highly tunable molecular building blocks offer an array of advantageous features such as intrinsic 3D nanostructured conducting frameworks, exceptional electrochemical activity to store and transport ions, and synthetically tunable polymer-water interactions.
I will present the design rationales for this new class of ‘energy gels’ to achieve a number of appealing functions that enable them to address key challenges in sustainable Water-Energy-Food Nexus. Several examples on functional organic gels-enabled advanced energy-water-related applications such as solar water desalination and atmospheric water harvesting, sustainable agriculture, and high-efficiency energy storage and conversion technologies, will be discussed to illustrate ‘structure-derived multifunctionality’ of this emerging class of materials.
About the Speaker
Guihua Yu is Temple Foundation Endowed Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering at University of Texas at Austin, and a core faculty of Texas Materials Institute and UT Energy Institute. His research has broadly focused on creative synthesis and self-assembly of functional organic and hybrid nanomaterials, and fundamental understanding of their unique chemical/physical properties for addressing frontier challenges in advanced energy, environmental and sustainability technologies. Yu has published ~350 peer-reviewed papers in many prominent scientific journals, and has been ranked among Top Highly Cited Researchers in both fields of Materials Science and Chemistry by Web of Science since 2017. Yu is an elected fellow of AAAS, MRS, RSC, IOP, IMMM, and IAAM, and has been recognized with many prestigious awards and honors, such as Blavatnik National Awards Honoree, Germany Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year, WYSS World Scientist Award for UN SDGs, RSC Horizon Prize, Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research, O’Donnell Award in Engineering by Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science (TAMEST), TMS Brimacombe Medalist Award, Polymer International-IUPAC Award for Creativity in Applied Polymer Science, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Sloan Research Fellow, MIT Technology Review ‘Top Innovators Under 35’ global list. Yu currently serves as Executive Editor of ACS Materials Letters (a flagship materials science journal by ACS), and Advisory Board Member of over 20 international scientific journals in material science and chemistry fields.
Host: Professor Lili Cai