Liming Dai

Departments of Macromolecular Science and Engineering

Case School of Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106, USA

Email: liming.dai@case.edu; http://case.edu/cse/eche/daigroup/index.html

 

As the global energy consumption has been accelerating at an alarming rate due to the rapid economic expansion worldwide, increase in world population, and ever-increasing human reliance on energy-based appliances, the research and development of sustainable energy conversion and storage technologies have become more important than ever. Although the efficiency of energy conversion and storage devices depends on a variety of factors, their overall performance strongly relies on the structure and property of the materials used. The recent development in nanotechnology has opened up new frontiers by creating new nanomaterials and structures, particularly carbon nanomaterials, for efficient energy conversion and storage [1, 2]. As a building block for carbon nanomaterials of all other dimensionalities (such as 0D buckyball, 1D nanotube, 3D graphite), the two-dimensional (2D) single atomic carbon sheet of graphene has emerged as an attractive candidate for energy applications due to its unique structure and properties [3]. Considerable efforts have been made to utilize graphene and its derivatives as energy materials, and tremendous progress has been achieved in developing high-performance energy conversion and storage devices based on graphitic carbon nanomaterials [4].

In this talk, I will present some of our work on rational design and development of multidimensional and multifunctional graphene nanomaterials for efficient energy conversion and storage, including solar cells containing functional graphene materials for improved charge transport, fuel cells and metal-air batteries with multifunctional graphene-based metal-free catalysts for oxygen reduction/evolution, and flexible supercapacitors based on multidimensional graphitic carbon nanomaterials for energy storage.

[1]      Dai L. (Ed.) “Carbon Nanotechnology: Recent Developments in Chemistry, Physics, Materials Science and Device Applications”, Elsevier: Amsterdam, 2006.

[2]      Dai L, Chang DW, Beak JB, Lu W. Small 2012, 8, 1130-1166.

[3]      Dai L. Acc. Chem. Res. 2013, 46, 31-42. 

[4]      Lu W, Baek JB, Dai L. (Eds.) “Carbon Nanomaterials for Advanced Energy Systems”, John Wiley &Sons: New York, 2015.

 

Liming Dai, Ph.D.

Liming Dai joined Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in fall 2009 as the Kent Hale Smith Professor in the Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering. He is also director of the Center of Advanced Science and Engineering for Carbon (CASE4Carbon). Dr. Dai received a BSc degree from Zhejiang University in 1983, and a PhD from the Australian National University in 1991. He accepted a postdoctoral fellowship from the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and two years later became a visiting follow in Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He spent 10 years with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Clayton, Australia. Before joining the CWRU, he was an associate professor of polymer engineering at the University of Akron and the Wright Brothers Institute Endowed Chair Professor of Nanomaterials at the University of Dayton.

Dr. Dai’s expertise lies across the synthesis, chemical modification and device fabrication of conjugated polymers and carbon nanomaterials for energy-related and biomedical applications. He has published over 350 scientific papers, a research monograph on intelligent macromolecules, an edited book on carbon nanotechnology, and held about 30 issued/applied patents. His h-index: >70; Citations: ~20,000 (Source: ISI Web of Science; Author query: “Dai LM” and “Dai L). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).