Oct 23
Chemistry Department Seminar: Tenure Track Candidate
"Turn up the Heat to Tackle Climate Change - How thermally-induced structural changes can make better batteries, fuel cells, and carbon capture materials."
Coordination materials (including Metal-Organic Frameworks, or MOFs) are nano-structured porous materials with lots of exciting properties - including applications in next-generation energy devices (batteries and fuel cells), and even the ability to trap greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. However, despite high temperature conditions being required for preparation and/or operation of these materials, their behavior at high temperatures is very poorly understood (outside of a handful of test cases). This talk will discuss our current understanding of how these "wonder materials" respond to high temperatures, consider some of the dramatic physical and chemical structural changes that heat treatment can induce, and outline how thermally-induced structural transitions can be exploited to generate new classes of materials that are increasingly sophisticated and increasingly useful in the fight against climate change.
*This seminar counts towards the chemistry major seminar attendance requirement.