Thursday, July 27, at 1 p.m. in Wegner G50
The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering is hosting a seminar presented by Yuhan Sun, Director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Lab for Low Carbon Conversion Science and Engineering on Shanghai, China.
Professor Yuhan Sun obtained his B.S. in 1983 from Zhengzhou University, and received his Ph.D degree from CAS Institute of Coal Chemistry (ICC) in 1989, and then joined the same institute from 1989 to 2013 as associate professor and professor. During this period, he worked at Brunel University UK and CalTech as a visiting professor from 1992 to 1995 and from 1999 to 2000, respectively. Professor Sun was one of those who were selected into the Hundred Talents Project of CAS in 1994. In 1996, he was granted the State Outstanding Young Scientist Funding for his academic achievements. Until now, he has served as the Director of the State Key Lab of Coal Conversion in 1996-2002, the General Director of CAS Institute of Coal Chemistry in 2000-2008, and the Board Chairman of CAS-BP Clean Energy Technology Center in 2009-2014. From 2009, he moved to Shanghai Advanced Research Institute of CAS and acts as VP in 2012-2017, and the director of the CAS Key Lab for Low Carbon Conversion Science and Engineering since 2014. Professor Sun’s research interests include C1 chemistry on coal/natural gas-based synfuels and chemicals, catalysis and engineering for CO2 utili-zation, application of nano-materials in green chemistry and optical film, etc. He has published over 500 papers on peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Nature Chem, Cell Chem, Angewandte Chem, EES, Chem Comm, Green Chem, ACS Catal, J Catal, J Mater Chem, and Catal Today, with more than 100 patents issued. He won the Outstanding Achievement Award of CAS, Second Prize for Natural Science and Technological Progress of Shanxi Province, etc.
CO2 Utilization – An Approach to Energy Conversion and Storage
CO2 Utilization, as the central part of C1 chemistry and CCUS, becomes one of the most severe challenges for human society nowadays. During the utilization of carbon-based resources, CO2 is the end-product indicating the use-up of carbon energy. In recent years, tremendous efforts have been put on CO2 utilization trying to convert them back to chemical products or energy. However, the amount of energy required to convert CO2 into an energy product is certainly higher than that can be provided by the resulted energy product. Hence, CO2 can be regarded as a carbon energy resource only if renewable energy is available and incorporated into the energy products. Of course, CO2 can be regarded as a carbon resource to provide compositional carbon element for new chemical molecules. As a result, CO2 can be regarded as an energy carrier for the transformation of renewable energy. In chemistry, CO2 utilization plays a role to complete the redox cycle, which is intrinsically redox reactions in nature. Charge transfer is the key step for the occurrence of the reactions. Moreover, charge transfer capability is critical for developing the related catalytic materials. Thus, nano/sub-nano catalysis plays a key role in the development of new technologies for CO2 utilization. Among them, four key factors can be summarized for nano/sub-nano catalysis.: Single – single atom and single site catalysis; Size – nano particle, nano crystal, and nano composite catalytic materials; Scale – descriptor or quantitative factors, such as distance, distribution, coverage, etc. In nano catalysis, also including mesoscale understandings for nano catalysis; Surrounding – chemical environment and geometric environment for active sites. Booming recent publications concerning CO2 utilization demonstrate the importance of C-O bond activation by nano/sub-nano catalysis with respect to the factors above mentioned.
