Wind and solar energy are the fastest growing sources of electricity in Canada. The biggest concern with wind and solar energy is that they’re intermittent. An energy storage solution is required to buffer the electricity fluctuation.  Our mission is to provide a sustainable solution with minimal envrionmental impact.

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1. Sustainable carbon nanomaterials
The nanostructures created by nature can be readily used as wonderful precursors for nanocarbons. That is what I learned in my postdoc research. Through combinations of various pre-treatments, carbonization steps, and chemical activations, we have succeeded in synthesizing a series of novel nature-inspired carbon nanomaterials in my postdoc research from various biomass sources, including hemp fibers, waste proteins, peat moss, and peanut shells . With optimized structures and compositions, these carbons exhibit excellent performance as electrodes for supercapacitors , ionic liquid EDLCs, LIB anodes  and SIB anodes . This work has attracted great attention from both the research community and the public sector.  

The fast-growing bioprocessing industry in Alberta provides us with valuable opportunities to use nanosized and pure cellulose and lignin as precursors. With impressive mechanical properties and excellent flexibility, nanocellulose is one of the most promising innovations in the modern forest industry. Depending on the processing, nanocellulose can be generally catalogued into 2 groups: cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) and nanocrystals (CNC). CNF are manufactured by mechanically delaminating or bacteria-assisted digesting cellulose rich biomass. They share similar geometric dimensions with CNTs, typically few micrometers in length and 10-50 nanometers in diameter. In the contrast, CNC, processed through acid digestion, is much shorter (~ 100 nm) and thinner (typically around 10 nm). Is it possible to carbonize and use them as low-cost substitute for CNTs? Our answer is YES for some applications in energy storage, especially for composite electrode. The functionality-rich surface of nanocellulose plays a key role.

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2. Understanding the stress in rechargeable batteries for better cycle-life
Stress in the charge/discharge remains the most likely culprit for electrode degradation and capacity fading in batteries. Unfortunately, we have very limited understanding of stress itself and therefore no specified solution. Although the in situ microscopy and spectrometry provide valuable insights into the impacts of the stress buildup and release (e.g., the stress-induced structure changes), the strength of stress is poorly understood, which is a knowledge gap in understanding the charge storage mechanism.

Emerged from atomic force microscopy (AFM), microcantilever sensors are freestanding beams with extremely high sensitivity to stress. Inspired by the ultrahigh sensitivity of microcantilevers, we have developed a cantilever-based platform and quantitively analyzed the localized stress induced in few-layers MoS2 upon the intercalation and extraction of Na. These results can be readily adapted to resolve the stress in a wide-range of electrode materials, gain additional insights into mechanical effects of charge storage, and for long life time battery design.

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3. Sustainable filter to remove the PM 2.5 
 Particle pollution, also called particulate matter (PM), is a mixture of solids and liquid droplets floating in the air. According to the size of particles, pollutant can be cataloged into 3 groups: coarse particles (PM 10, <10µm), (PM 2.5, <2.5µm) and ultrafine particles (UFPs, <1.0 or even 0.1 µm). Compared to PM10 and PM 2.5, UFPs do much more damage to human body because of their small size: i) UFPs can evade human phagocytosis system and deposited in the lung with a high rate of retention; ii) UFPs deposited in the lung can translocate to other organs through the circulation; iii) UFPs can even penetrate intracellularly and lead to potential DNA damage; iv) with the high specific surface area, UFPs carry much more adsorbed hazardous chemicals.  

In the heavily polluted regions especially in developing countries like India and China, low-cost, and efficient personal respiratory protection devices are essential for public health. The traditional cotton surgical face mask may help with the PM 10 but become futile with PM 2.5.
We built a homemade automatic respiratory system which mimics the continuous human breathing. This system allows us to accurately evaluate the PM 2.5 removal efficiency and life time of filtration media. We are having fun in developing low-cost filtration media based on sustainable nanomaterials. 

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank our sponsors and collaborators to support our research!

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