报告摘要：
Carbon nanomaterials have many extraordinary properties, which depend on their unique nanoscale structures. There are two key challenges in realizing their potential applications. First, it is difficult to produce carbon nanomaterials with precisely controlled nanoscale structures in large quantity. Second, carbon nanomaterials often lose their desired properties observed in nanoscale when used as the building block of macroscopic systems. This talk covers our research efforts on addressing these two challenges in four areas.
 
First, several sulfur-doped cobalt catalysts were developed to synthesize semiconducting (9,8) single-walled carbon nanotubes with good production scalability. We found sulfur affects the nucleation and catalytic activity of metal catalyst particles. The effects of sulfur can be controlled to modulate chirality selectivity and carbon yield in single-walled carbon nanotube synthesis.1-5 Second, we used space-confined channels as hydrothermal reactors to assemble graphene oxide sheets and carbon nanotubes into multiscale hierarchical structured hybrid fibers, which shows high volumetric capacitance. The hybrid carbon fibers were used to construct fiber supercapacitors. These devices can cover a wide range of energy and power needs, and they demonstrate good potentials as energy storage solutions for wearable and implantable devices.6-11 Third, graphene oxide sheets were used to modulate properties of polymeric hollow fiber membranes for water treatment. Further, versatile carbon architectures were designed by intercalating surface-functionalized, small-diameter, multi-walled carbon nanotubes into reduced graphene oxide sheets to create highly stable membranes with engineered nanochannels, demonstrating improved water permeability and enhanced membrane selectivity.12-15 Lastly, we studied the antibacterial activity of carbon nanomaterials to understand their health and environmental impacts better.

报告人简介：
Professor Yuan Chen received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Tsinghua University in China, and a Ph.D. from Yale University in the United States. He was at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore from 2005 to 2015. He joined the University of Sydney in 2015. His research focuses on developing scalable processes to synthesize carbon nanomaterials with well-defined atomic structures, assemble nanoscale carbon nanomaterials into functional macroscale structures, and use these novel materials for sustainable energy and environmental applications. In particular, his research team works on energy and water applications, such as high energy density supercapacitors, fiber supercapacitors for smart textiles, Zn-air batteries, electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution, oxygen reduction, oxygen evolution reactions, carbon-based membranes, and antibacterial coatings. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Fellow Royal Australian Chemical Institute Chartered Chemist. He received the Australian Research Council Professorial Future Fellowship in 2016, an Excellence in Review Award from Carbon in 2015, a Young Scientist Award from the Singapore National Academy of Science in 2011, a Tan Chin Tuan Exchange Fellowship in Engineering in 2010, and JSPS exchange award in 2009. He is currently serving as an editor for Carbon (impact factor 7.082) and Nanomaterials (impact factor 3.504). He also serves as Chair for Australian Carbon Society and Asian Association of Carbon Groups since August 2017.