Speaker: Yue Zhou, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at South Dakota State University
Title: Advanced Materials for High-performance Energy Devices
Abstract: Renewable energy sources e.g., wind, solar, and hydroelectricity have attracted enormous interest in the past decades. However, there are still some challenges to capture those energy sources and store the energy effectively. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances made in my group on advanced materials such as ceramics, and their wide applications in sustainable energy. Firstly, I will present several nanofabrication techniques developed in my lab to manufacture advanced materials with controllable morphology and properties. We employed those advanced materials for various applications by performing bottom-up investigations to unravel the process-propertyperformance relationship. Secondly, I will discuss our recent studies on multifunctional inorganic material engineering for energy storage application, specifically in lithium metal batteries. To protect lithium metal electrode to enable high safety and energy density, we employed a set of techniques such as physical vapor deposition, atomic layer deposition, plasma activation, and in situ treatment to fabricate multifunctional protective layers on lithium metal electrodes with both high electric properties and high mechanical properties. The layers with those effective manufacturing strategies give rise to a long lifetime and high performance of the assembled cells. At the end of the talk, I will also discuss other ongoing and proposed projects comprising fundamental and applied studies.
Bio: Yue Zhou is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at South Dakota State University since January 2018. Before that, he has been working as a Postdoctoral Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for two years after receiving his Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University in December 2015. His research and teaching interests mainly focus on advanced materials, energy storage, energy conversion, and biomedical devices. He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed journal articles in top journals such as Advanced Materials, Nature Communications, Energy & Environmental Science, Advanced Energy Materials, etc. Half of them are published after he joined South Dakota State University as an independent investigator. His research and teaching have been recognized with several awards, such as young faculty award, grant winship award, outstanding doctoral research award, conference awards, and recognitions such as IEEE Senior Membership. He also received grant supports from various private, state, and federal agencies such as NSF, EDA, NASA, USDA, and industry sponsors with total share of more than $3M.