Date/Time: 15:00 p.m. Monday, Jan 9th
Venue: Room A332, No.50 Building
Lecturer: Dr. Qilei Song, Imperial College London
Abstract:
Sustainable energy supply and clean environment are key global challenges in the 21st century. Breakthrough technologies and step-change materials are desirable for renewable fuel production and conversion, renewable energy production and storage, CO2 capture and conversion, water purification and desalination. Novel functional porous materials hold great promises for solving these global challenges. Here I will briefly present our recent research on a range of functional porous materials with chemical structures defined on a molecular level, such as layered double hydroxides (LDHs), metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), polymers of intrinsic microporosity (PIMs), and molecular crystals such as porous organic cages (POCs), which are promising for a wide range of applications in separations, catalysis, and energy storage. I will present our work on molecular design and nano-scale fabrication strategies, understanding their structures and properties, and applications in energy and environmental processes. We synthesised LDHs materials and derived nanostructured metal oxides and applied them in chemical looping processes for CO2 capture and H2 production. We developed various approaches to design and fabrication of microporous membranes, such as polymer/MOF nanocomposites, photochemical modified and crosslinked PIM polymers, and solution-processed porous organic cage membranes, and polymer nanofilm membranes by in situ polymerisation. Molecular sieve membranes derived from PIMs polymer show ground-breaking separation performance in gas separation and molecular separation in organic solvents.