Nanomaterials with carefully tailored properties (such as interface, geometry) can be used to manipulate the flow of phonons, electrons and photons, to enable novel energy devices in an unconventional manner.
Photon management, involving both absorption enhancement and reflection reduction, is critical to all solar energy conversion devices. A novel nanophotonic design can enable high energy conversion efficiency and low cost at the same time.
Advanced thermal devices for heat control and conversion are very desirable, but significantly underdeveloped. Nanomaterials with well-defined size, geometry and interface can be used to control phonon behaviors, therefore the heat flow in an unprecedented manner.
Energy storage devices such as lithium ion batteries and supercapacitors are important for electronics, vehicles and smart grid. Nanostructures have the advantages of facile strain relaxation, enhance power rate but also present a challenge of forming stable electrode-electrolyte interface.
| 2017-07-03 Ningxu's solar steam-generation devices work is highlighted by advanced science news! |
| 2016-11-26 Our GO based Solar Desalination work is highlighted by IEEE Spectrum and Xinhua News. |
| 2016-11-09 Guangxin is awarded with several pretigious scholarships |
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We are the research group of Jia Zhu, Professor of College of Engineering and Applied Science at Nanjing University. Our interdisciplinary research bridges nanoscience, materials science, applied physics and engineering. We are probing fundamental electrical, optical and thermal phenomenon at nanoscale, and developing novel nanomaterials and devices for mainly energy applications including next generation solar, thermal and electrical related energy conversion and storage devices.
We seek highly motivated research scientists, graduate students and undergraduate students to join the group. They will have the opportunity to work closely with the principal investigator on one of the following directions:
1. Energy Conversion
2. Nanoscale Heat Transfer
3. Nanophotonics
4. Energy Storage
5. Water Treatment
| Peng Tao, George Ni, Chengyi Song, Wen Shang, Jianbo Wu, Jia Zhu*, Gang Chen*, and Tao Deng*."Solar-driven interfacial evaporation". Nature Energy. Doi.org/10.1038/s41560-018-0260-7 |
| Yang Wang, Lin Zhou*, Ye Zhang, Jianyu Yu, Baili Huang, Yuxi Wang, Yun Lai, Shining Zhu, and Jia Zhu* "Hybrid Solar Absorber–Emitter by Coherence-Enhanced Absorption for Improved Solar Thermophotovoltaic Conversion". Adv. Optical Mater., 1800813(2018) |
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