NEES Teleseminars

EFRC NEES Teleseminar - Tian Li
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.
2168 AVW
For More Information:
Elizabeth Lathrop
301 405 7801
lathrop5@umd.edu

Speaker: Dr. Tian Li

Title: Cellulose Nanofluidic Membrane for Ion Selectivity

Abstract:
The emergence of nanofluidic has led to the development of many important applications such as ionic cable, ionic diode, ion separation, and nanopore osmotic energy generation. Nanotechnology for renewable energy conversion is of particular interest owning to the new phenomenon enabled by the nanoscale confinement.

Here, we demonstrate for the first time utilizing cellulose based nanofluidic system to drive ionic transportation with highly selective ion mobility. We observe a record high thermopower of 24 mV/K with the prepared liquid electrolyte infiltrated in the nanofluidic scaffold, compared with ~10 mV/K with its bulk counterpart. This enhancement stems from the nanochannel-governed ion transportation and the enormously enhanced ion selectivity owning to the interaction between colloidal particles and the charged walls of nanofluidic system. The thermally charging current along the nanochannels is experimentally observed to substantially increase. In this work, we innovatively designed a massive nanofiber scaffold via a scalable manufacturing process, largely overcoming the prevailing challenges of the manufacturing difficulties of nanofluidic system for realistic applications.

Dr. Tian Li is currently a postdoctoral researcher with Liangbing Hu in the Department of Materials Science Engineering, Univeristy of Maryland. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park in 2015. She received the ECE Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship and the Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award in 2015 in recognition of her Ph.D. research.

This Event is For: Graduate • Faculty • Post-Docs