Title：Defect Electrocatalysis
Lecturer：Professor Xiangdong Yao, Energy Materials and Griffith University Australia
Time：4:30p.m. ,May 6th,2019(Monday)
Place：Conference Room 210, Chemistry Building(West)
Abstract：
Electrocatalysis is the key for energy conversion and storage devices such as fuel cells, metal-air batteries and water splitting. The development of highly efficient and non-precious metal catalyst is extremely important. Recently, we presented a new concept of defect electrocatalysis, in which the topological defects on carbons or in oxides/compounds are the active sites for electrochemical reactions. A series of non-metal catalysts have been developed based on this new theory. Besides, the defects are such characterized points with higher energy, thus provides ideal sites to interact with non-/metal species in various sizes. The strong interactions may provide both high reactivity and stability. When the size of metal species reduces to atomic level, the general configurations are metal atoms trapped into defects according to the minimum energy theory. The coordination of the defect and atomic species plays the central role for electrocatalysis as the local electronic structures defined by this coordination determines the interaction of reactant and active sites.
About the Lecturer：
Xiangdong Yao is a full Professor of Energy Materials and Griffith University Australia. He was originally from China where he finished his Primary, Senior and Tertiary education. He obtained his BEng at Northeastern University in 1989 and MEng at Northwestern Polytechnical University in 1992 respectively for Materials Science and Engineering. From 1992 to 2000, he was employed in Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences as Research Associate (1992), Assistant Professor (1995) and Associate Professor (1998). In 2000, he came to The University of Queensland where he was granted the PhD degree in Materials Engineeng in 2005, working on the computational modeling for microstructure formation in light metals. From November 2003, he joined the ARC Centre of Excellence for Functional Nanomaterials at The University of Queensland. Since November 2009, he joined Griffith University as an Associate Professor and the group leader of Advanced Energy Materials, and promoted to full Professor in late 2012. Dr Yao’s current research focuses on Energy Materials, especially hydrogen-related materials.
