学术报告报告题目：Design Principles of Efficient Carbon-basedElectrocatalysts for Clean Energy Conversionand Storage
报告人：夏振海教授
BiographyZhenhai Xia received his Ph.D. degrees inMaterials Science and Engineering from Northwestern Polytechnic University in1990. He served on the faculty of Hebei University of Technology between 1990and 1997 as professor and department chair, Humboldt Research Fellow at GermanAerospace Center (DLR) between 1997 and 1999, and Senior Research Associate atBrown University between 1999 and 2006. He is now a full Professor with a jointappointment in Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Departmentof Chemistry at the University of North Texas, USA. Professor Xia’s currentresearch interests are focused on carbon-based materials as catalysts for cleanenergy conversion and storage; biological and biomimetic materials, mechanicsof materials, and multiscale modeling andsimulation. He has published 2 booksand over 150 publications including two in Science and three in Nature series.He recently received German Humboldt Scholar Award in 1997, and “NanoscienceResearch Leader Award” from Science Letters in 2015, and Changjiang ScholarAward from Ministry of Education in 2016.AbstractClean andsustainable energy technologies, such as fuel cells, metal-air batteries,water-splitting and solar cells, are currently under intensive research anddevelopment because of their high efficiency, promising large-scaleapplications, and virtually no pollution or greenhouse gas emission. At theheart of these energy devices, there are three critical chemical reactions:oxygen reduction reaction(ORR),oxygen evolution reaction(OER) andhydrogen evolution reaction(HER) thatdetermine the efficiencies of energy conversion and storage. These reactions,however, are sluggish and require noble metals (e.g., platinum) or their oxides as catalysts. The limited resourcesand high cost of platinum have hampered the commercialization of thesetechnologies. Therefore, it is necessary to search for alternative materials toreplace Pt.Carbon nanomaterials,such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene, are appealing as an alternativefor metal-free catalytic applications because of their structures and excellentproperties. Althoughthe superior catalyticcapabilities of heteroatom-doped carbon nanomaterials for ORR have beendemonstrated, trial-and-error approaches are still used to date for thedevelopment of highly-efficient catalysts. To rationally design a catalyst, itis critical to understand which intrinsic material characteristics, ordescriptors that control catalysis.Through first-principlescalculations, we have identified a material property that serves as theactivity descriptor for predicating ORR and OER activities, and established avolcano relationship between the descriptor and the bifunctional activities ofthe carbon-based nanomaterials. Such descriptor enables us to design newmetal-free catalysts with enhanced ORR and OER activities, even better thanthose reported for platinum-based metal catalysts. The design principles can beused as a guidance to develop various new carbon-based materials for cleanenergy conversion and storage.
报告时间：2016年12月9日（星期五）上午9:00~10:30
报告地点：新化工楼B106会议室 衷心欢迎广大师生参加
化学化工学院
化学生物传感与计量学国家重点实验室
