HIT News (By Xiao Ke) Recently, Zhong Jing, a young teacher of the School of Civil Engineering made systematic research into the existing problems of interface and surface science and mechanics in the modification and assembly of carbon nanomaterials which need to be solved urgently, and achieved a series of innovative results, which was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and guided by Li Hui, a specially-appointed professor of the Chang Jiang Scholars Program.
Carbon nano-tubes and graphene are two typical nanomaterials which are made up of sp2 hybridized carbon atoms, with superior mechanical, electrical, thermal and chemical stability. It is still a research hotspot and a multidisciplinary field to create these types of nanomaterials and prepare the macroscopic materials with corresponding superior physical and chemical properties. This research has broad potential for applications in structural engineering, energy engineering and other fields.
Our researchers first proposed the use of three-dimensional self-supporting porous structure of carbon nano-tube foam as a current collector for supercapacitors. They prepared supercapacitors which were flexible, compressible and had extremely high energy storage capacity by depositing nanoscale polyaniline. The research results were published in the journal Nano Energy (Impact Factor 10.3), which is famous in the field of nano-energy. Our school is the first author. Based on that, our researchers explored further to utilize controllable chemical cutting technology to cut some part of carbon nano-tubes and use it as an assembled unit to control the configuration direction of gel pores of the cut carbon nano-tubes and studied its internal rules and mechanisms by controlling the freezing gradient direction. The result was published as a cover in the journal Carbon (Impact Factor 6.2), which is famous in the field of carbon materials.
The controllable assembly of nanomaterials can implement multi-scale design of the preparation of multi-functional devices. Based on previous work, our researchers utilized wet spinning method to prepare shape memory polymer composite fiber with an ultrahigh stretch ability and used it as the substrate to achieve the preparation of multi-scale composite electrode by means of layers of electrostatic assembly and self-limiting chemical deposition respectively. Recently, the result was published in the journal Nano Energy (Impact Factor 10.3). Our school is the first signature unit of the first author and the only unit of the communication author of the paper. Zhong Jing is the first and communication author of the paper. Two researchers from the French National Academy of Sciences and the American Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute were involved in parts of the paper.
Edited By Yan MingXing
