Speaker: Jia Zhu, Professor

Affiliation: College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University

Interfacial Solar Steam Generations: Materials, Structures and Applications

Water scarcity is one of the most pressing global challenges. Nanomaterials with carefully tailored properties can be used to manipulate the flow of phonons, electrons and photons, to enable unconventional solution addressing this issue. In this talk, I will present our recent progress in solar steam generation for water treatment.

We report a plasmon-enhanced solar desalination device. This most efficient and broad-band plasmonic absorber is fabricated through self-assembly of metallic nanoparticles onto a nanoporous template by one step deposition process. Because of its efficient light absorption and strong field enhancement, it can enable very efficient and effective solar desalination by using low cost aluminum nanoparticles.

Inspired by the transpiration process in plants, we report an artificial transpiration device with a unique design of two dimensional water path. With efficient two dimensional water supply and suppressed heat loss, it can enables an efficient (80% under one-sun illumination) and effective (four orders salinity decrement) solar desalination device. More strikingly, the energy transfer efficiency of this artificial transpiration device is independent of water quantity and can be achieved without extra optical or thermal supporting systems, therefore significantly improves the scalability and feasibility of this technology.

About the Speaker

Dr. Jia Zhu is a Professor at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University. His scientific research interest is in the area of nanomaterials, nanophotonics and nanoscale heat transfer.

Dr. Zhu obtained his bachelor in Physics at Nanjing University, received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. In Sept. 2013, he returned to Nanjing University, joining as a Professor at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Dr. Zhu has received several prestigious awards, including: OSA Young Investigator Award (2017), Dupont Young Professor Award (2016), MIT Tech Review TR35 award (2016), One-thousand Talented Program (2014), Division of Inorganic Chemistry Yong Investigator Award (American Chemical Society, 2011), Gold Medal of Graduate Student Award (Material Research Society, 2010). He has published over 50 papers in prestigious journals (Nature Photonics, Nature Nanotech., Nature Materials., Science Advances, PNAS, Nano Lett., Advanced Materials, etc.). He has delivered over 40 keynote/invited talks at leading research institutions, international conferences. He is also a reviewer of over 30 scientific journals.