Research

1. Semiconductor Photochemistry

Solar energy harvesting employing nanostructured semiconducting materials as building block has attracted numerous interest. Various photochemical systems have been thus developed, such as semiconductor photo(electro)catalysis and perovskite solar cells. Our special interest lies on capturing sunlight for environmental remediation, solar fuel synthesis, and electric power. Current projects include coupling photo(electro)catalysis with membrane filtration process for water purification; novel sensitizer and arrayed nanostructures for photoelelctrochemical water purification, solar fuel production, and value-added chemical synthesis, and key materials for perovskite solar cells.

2. Chemical Energy Storage

Our lab focuses on the lithium and aluminum batteries with high energy density and long life for cyclic charge-discharge process. We interest in rational design and large-scale synthesis of electrode materials and electrolytes, and try to understand the crystal structure evolution during the cyclic charge/discharge process. Recently, we have reproducibly synthesized Li₄Ti₅O₁₂, TiNb₂O₇, TiO₂, and Li₂ZnTi₃O₈ with favorable textural properties for advanced chemical energy storage, with special focuses on the phase purity control and nanostructures tailoring. Our efforts are also devoted to screening organic electrodes, designing electrolytes, understanding the interfacial electrochemical process and crystal phase evolution in the electrode materials to improve the capacity and cycling performances of lithium/aluminum-ion batteries.

3. Self-Assembled Porous Materials

Self-assembly is a spontaneous process enabling to organize building blocks including molecules and nano/micro/macro-sized objects into well-defined aggregates as a consequence of specific, local interactions among the components themselves. In a wet chemical route, driving force for self-assembly generally involves chemical bonding (covalent, ionic, van der Waals, hydrogen...). Experimentally, the self-assembly process can be also manipulated by tuning experimental parameters such as solvent nature (polarity , hydrophobicity, dielectricity...), the presence of template, and the nature building blocks (shape, dimension, surface energy...). During the past decade, we have focused on the self-assembly of nano/micro-building block into hierarchical and porous structure. Interests mainly lie in the underlying formation mechanism and the accompanied crystal transition and growth.