报告摘要：
To develop technologies and products to meet evergrowing needs of the modern society poses constant challenges as well as enormous opportunities to the engineering society.  Quite often, to fully address these challenges require multidisciplinary approaches, from atoms to systems, and out of the box thinking.  In this talk, I will present two examples of research in my group in which, out of the box thinking with small changes in material design approaches have lead to marked improvements or even materials breakthroughs, including (i) a totally new approach of dielectric nanocomposites for electric energy storage and regulation, which is very low cost and easy to fabrication, but with the properties far beyond these using the conventional nanocomposite approach which rely on high volume loading of high dielectric constant nanofillers. (ii) a giant electrocaloric effect over a broad temperature range in a class of ferroelectric polymers, which has shown promise for highly efficient and zero greenhouse gas emission solid state cooling devices to replace the century old vapor compression cooling (such as present air conditioners and refrigerators). In addition to the EC materials breakthroughs, this talk will also present recent advances in the prototype EC devices, which can be flexible, wearable, and chip-scale with high efficiency.

报告人简介：
Prof. Qiming Zhang is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. During his tenure at Penn State, his group has conducted advanced researches covering dielectrics and charge storage devices, electrocaloric effect and solid-state cooling devices, actuators, sensors, transducers, energy harvesting, polymer thin film devices and MEMS, and electro-optic and photonic devices. Prof. Zhang has about 450 publications including Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters, Advanced Materials, Journal of the American Chemical Society etc., and 20 patents in these areas. In addition, he has also pursued actively commercialization of the researches from his group. For example, a class of electroactive polymer with giant electroactuation invented by Prof. Zhang have been commercialized by Arkema, a world leading specialty chemical and advanced materials company. Prof. Zhang founded a start-up company, StrategicPolymer Science, Inc. (SPS, now Novasentis), which has successfully commercialized the electroactive polymer actuator products for wearable, haptics, and IOT applications.