Nanostructuring for Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage Materials Towards Clean Energy
Turgut M. Gür
Abstract:
A sustainable future requires total decarbonization of the global electric power generation, which heavily relies on fossil fuels. While renewable energy sources are essential to achieve decarbonization, their deployment rate has been slow, and heavily dependent on the wide availability and accessibility of electrical energy storage. Pumped hydro is the dominant storage technology that makes up nearly 95% of the global storage inventory. However, there is great need for large-scale, distributed, and portable energy storage technologies to enable rapid integration of renewables into the electric grid.
Solar energy offers environmentally clean and cheap electricity, but at low conversion efficiencies in the 15-25%. More effective management of electrons and photons will help improve conversion efficiency. By the same token, controlling interfaces and designing catalytically active surfaces by nanostructuring will benefit electrochemical energy conversion rates and efficiencies and improve energy storage capacities.
This talk will start by emphasizing the magnitude of global challenges in energy and followed by an introduction to design tools for materials innovation. After discussing the role of size and nanostructuring for effective management of electrons and photons in materials, I will move into electrochemical energy conversion devices and illustrate with examples how nanostructuring, interface design, compositional grading, and atomic scale control of defects and surface grains improve behavior and performance of electrochemical devices and functional energy materials.
Bio:
Turgut M. Gür is an Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where he recently retired after nearly four decades of a distinguished career that also included leadership for three major multi-disciplinary theme-based research centers on campus focused on advanced materials and energy conversion and storage.
He is the immediate past President of The Electrochemical Society (ECS), which is one of the oldest scientific societies in the US and the largest international society in its field in the world serving as the scientific home to 16 Nobel laureates and nearly 8,000 member scientists from 80 countries across the globe. He also serves on the ECS Board Directors and is an inducted Fellow of The Electrochemical Society.
He is a highly cited and internationally recognized leader in high temperature electrochemical energy conversion and storage technologies, materials and processes with 11 US issued patents, 171 technical publications, and 150 presentations at international conferences, and more than 80 invited talks, lectures, and colloquia.
He holds BSc and MSc degrees in Chemical Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and three graduate degrees including a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
Date: 20 March 2024
Time: 14:00
Location: Rektörlük Binası - Yeşil Salon