Highlights & News
ACS Energy Letters article highlighted as Editor's choice
This article made a thorough analysis into the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of ionic thermoelectric (i-TE) devices, and points out how to make i-TEs with high efficiency and power density in harvesting low-grade heat energy.
Ph.D. student Yuchi Chen's article selected as the front cover of EcoMat
This study clarifies the concept of solvation shell engineering for making highly efficient thermogalvanic batteries that can convert low-grade heat into electricity using redox pairs. By using water-acetone co-solvents, the authors demonstrated the effect of acetone insertion into the first solvation shell of the redox ion, leading to an enhanced reaction entropy and a nearly threefold increase in the thermopower of thermogalvanic batteries.
Review Article on Phonon Engineering published in Nature Materials
This article discusses insights into manipulating phonon dynamics and recent discoveries of both inorganic and organic materials with ultrahigh and low thermal conductivity, highlighting heat-conduction physics, strategies used to change thermal conductivity, and future directions to achieve extreme thermal conductivities in solid-state materials.
Xin Qian joined Huazhong University of Science and Technology as a faculty in 2021.
Xin Qian's PhD thesis was selected as the Outstanding Dissertation Award by the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences of CU Boulder.
Xin Qian's paper "Thermal Conductivity Modeling of Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Crystals and Superlattices" is featured in Advances in Engineering.
Xin Qian's research on the anisotropic thermal conductivity of layered transition metal dichalcogenides is highlighted on the website of College of Engineering & Applied Sciences.
Research on lattice thermal transport of hybrid perovskite highlighted as Top 10 Most Cited Articles of APL in 2016
This paper developed the interatomic potential and used molecular dynamics to model thermal transport in the promising next-generation photovoltaic material — hybrid perovskite for the first time. This paper discovered strong anharmonic phonon scattering in hybrid perovskite, leading to its ultralow thermal conductivity.