Guihua Yu
Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin
“Designing Functional Organic Nonmaterials for Advanced Energy Technologies”
Nanostructured materials have become critically important in many areas of technology, ranging from renewable energy, electronics, and photonics to biology and medicine, because of their unusual physical/chemical properties due to confined dimensions of such materials. This talk will present a new class of polymeric materials we developed recently: nanostructured conducting polymer gels (nCPGs) that are hierarchically porous, and structurally tunable in terms of size, shape, composition, hierarchical porosity, and chemical interfaces. nCPGs as functional organic building blocks offer an array of advantageous features such as intrinsic 3D nanostructured conducting framework, exceptional electrical conductivity and electrochemical activity to store and transport ions, synthetically tunable structures and chemical interface, and they have been demonstrated powerful for a number of applications in energy, environment and healthcare technologies. Several examples on nCPGs-enabled advanced energy and smart electronic devices including high-energy lithium batteries, supercapacitors, self-healing, and adaptive electronics, will be discussed to illustrate ‘structure-derived multi-functionality’ of this special class of materials.