Scalable manufacturing of nanostructured materials for energy conversion and storage
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Scalable manufacturing of nanostructured materials for energy conversion and storage
Tue, 14/05/2019 - 13:45 to 14:45
Location:
Speaker:
Prof. J. Ruud van Ommen
Affiliation:
Delft University of Technology
Synopsis:
Nanostructured materials are very useful in products such as Li-ion batteries, catalysts, and LED lights. Often, such materials have nanostructure particles as their building blocks. A hurdle in the application is that typically large amounts of such materials are required. Current liquid-phase and gas-phase synthesis methods often lack the high precision required or do not lend themselves to large-scale production. Gas-phase coating using atomic layer deposition (ALD) can be used to provide the surface of a particle with either an ultrathin continuous coating or a decoration of nanoclusters. When carried out in a fluidized bed (particles suspended in an upward gas flow), ALD is an attractive way of producing nanostructured particles with great scale-up potential and an efficient use of precursor. Moreover, when continuous production of such materials is desired, a pneumatic transport reactor is convenient way to apply spatial ALD to particles. I will demonstrate how these approaches can be used to combine high precision with scalable production. I will illustrate the usefulness of this approach with some examples from the energy field.
Biography:
Prof. J. Ruud van Ommen obtained his PhD degree in Chemical Engineering at Delft University of Technology in 2001. Currently, he is a full professor, leading the Product & Process Engineering group at Delft University of Technology. Moreover, he is director of the TU Delft Process Technology Institute. He has been visiting professor at Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden) and the University of Colorado (Boulder, USA).
In the past decade, prof. van Ommen expanded his research from chemical reactor engineering to the scalable production of advanced, nanostructured materials. In 2011, he started an ambitious program (funded by an ERC Starting Grant) to investigate the interplay between agglomeration and coating of nanoparticles in the gas phase. This fundamental work is already leading to practical applications, e.g. for energy conversion and storage, and for pharmaceuticals production. These practical applications have been co-funded by industry and two ERC Proof of Concept grants, and has led founding the spin-off company Delft IMP. A second part of van Ommen’s current research efforts embedded in TU Delft’s e-Refinery initiative, in which the electrocatalytic production of base chemicals is investigated. The efforts of his team are mostly aimed developing scalable reactor configurations for e.g. CO2 reduction.