Abstract
A sustainable future demandsadvanced materials for energy storage and conversion. The ability to understand, design and characterize materials affords great opportunities for controlling underlying physical and chemical processes, which can ultimately lead to high performance energy devices.
This talk will cover several examples on designingelectrochemical materials and devices for both energy storage and conversion. The first example is designing high-performance sulfur electrode for energy storage. Two approaches have been demonstrated: In one approach,closed nanostructures efficiently trap soluble polysulfides and minimize electrode pulverization, leading to both long cycle life and high capacity.  In the other approach, solubility of lithium polysulfides inspires us to develop a new type of hybrid flow battery for grid-level energy storage. The second example is designing transparent batteries for transparent electronics. Crossbar-structured electrodes with microscale features are realized by microfabrication to render the device transparent.
In another direction, although batteries are known for electricity storage, we demonstrate that by cycling a battery between low and high temperatures, thermal energy can be converted into electricity.  Prussian blue analogs are identified as potential materials as their small overpotential results in ahigh efficiency in heat harvesting. A charging-free, purely heat-powered battery is also demonstrated experimentally.

Biography:
Dr. Yuan Yang received his B.S. in physics at Peking University in 2007 and Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at Stanford University in 2012.At Stanford he worked under supervision of Prof. Yi Cui. Dr. Yang is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Gang Chen's group in the department of mechanical engineering at MIT. He is going to be an assistant professor in department of applied physics and applied mathematics with materials science and engineering at Columbia University this summer. His research interests include electrochemical materials and devices, thermal energy harvesting and thermal management. He received MRS Postdoctoral Award (2015), Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad (2012), Cubicciotti Award with Honor Mention of the Electrochemical Society (2010), O. Cutler Shepard Award of Stanford University (2010). His publication record can be found online at www.mit.edu/~yuanyang