Interfacial Structure, Ion Transport, and Heat Generation in Electrical Double Layers
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Interfacial Structure, Ion Transport, and Heat Generation in Electrical Double Layers
Wed, 09/04/2025 - 14:00 to 15:00
Location:
Speaker:
Professor Guang Feng
Affiliation:
Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Synopsis:
Electrical double layers are essential in many fields, such as electrical energy storage, electrocatalysis, electroplating, capacitive deionization, and so on. Despite considerable studies on EDLs, the details of what would happen at electrolyte-electrode interfaces still require in-depth exploration, in particular, how heat would be generated during charging/discharging. During the last several years, we developed constant-potential molecular dynamics (MD) modeling techniques to investigate the interfacial structure, ion transport, and heat generation in electrical double layers. Focusing on EDLs in supercapacitors, we examined EDL systems with different electrodes and electrolytes, supported by experimental measurements, to understand mechanisms of EDL formation and thus to help the design of supercapacitors. The contents of this talk would include:
(1) Developing modeling techniques of constant-potential MD simulations, which presents the developed algorithm and code package of MD simulations for accurately mimicking EDL systems.
(2) Exploring the influence of water impurity on ionic liquid (IL) EDLs, which expatiates water adsorption on electrode surfaces in contact with humid ILs and the possible strategy to reduce the water electrosorption at polarized electrodes.
(3) Studying the capacitance and charging dynamics of ILs in porous electrodes, which would show how nanoporous carbon and conductive MOFs as electrodes could achieve promising capacitive performance.
(4) Exploring the heat generation of EDL formation in aqueous and IL electrolytes, which reveals that EDL formation in aqueous electrolytes exhibits endothermicity under negative polarization and shows new complexity of endothermicity followed by exothermicity in ILs, regardless of electrode polarity.
Biography:
Guang Feng, PhD, FRSC
Chair Professor, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST)
Associate Director of Human Resource Office, HUST
He received his Ph.D. in 2010 from Clemson University, USA, as the Outstanding Student in the Doctoral Degree Program awardee in Department of Mechanical Engineering. From 2010 to 2013, he worked at Vanderbilt University and The Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport (FIRST) Energy Frontier Research Center, USA, as a postdoctoral research associate and then as a research assistant professor. In 2013, he joined School of Energy and Power Engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, as a professor.
His current research interests are focused on molecular modeling of interface and transport phenomena in electrical energy storage, capacitive deionization for desalination, and CO2-EOR. He has published 4 book chapters and more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals (including Nature Materials, Nature Computational Science, Nature Communications, PRL, PRX, JACS, Joule, Energy & Environmental Science, Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, Chemical Reviews, etc.). He was selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2019 and funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China for Outstanding Young Scholars in 2023. He won the first prize of the Provincial Natural Science Award of Hubei and Youth Science and Technology Innovation Award, and now serves as an associate editor of Energy Advances, an editorial board member of Green Energy & Environment, ChemElectroChem, Fluid Phase Equilibria, and Journal of Ionic Liquids.
More information about him is available at http://itp.energy.hust.edu.cn/English.htm.