Prof. Xianglei Liu

School of Energy and Power Engineering,

Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China

Xianglei Liu is a full professor of School of Energy and Power Engineering in Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Prof. Liu obtained Ph.D. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016. 

He mainly focuses on the researches of micro/nanoscale heat transfer, solar fuel production, and thermal energy storage. He has authored and coauthored 3 book chapters, more than 120 peer reviewed journal papers, and 50 conference papers/presentations. He received Elsevier/JASRT Raymond Viskanta Awards and the Sigma Xi Best Ph.D. Thesis Award.

Title: Biomimetic SiC Ceramics for High-performance Solar-thermal Energy Storage

Abstract：Solar thermal conversion and storage technology has attracted wide attention because of its unique advantages of overcoming the fluctuation and intermittence of solar energy, being more environmentally friendly with small carbon footprint. Conventional solar thermal conversion and storage methods, however, have bottleneck problems of redundant heat transfer processes and low efficiencies. Here, we present integrated volumetric solar thermal conversion and thermal storage methods. Wood-derived SiC and loofah derived SiC ceramic-based photo-thermal energy storage materials are proposed, realizing efficient sunlight absorbing, high thermal conductivity, and large energy storage density, viz., so-called hitting three birds with one stone. The prepared oak wood-derived SiC ceramic-based thermal storage material exhibits ultra-high thermal conductivity of 116 W/mK. Besides, by partially removing the interwoven lignin and hemicellulose from natural wood. The porosity of porous wood-derived SiC ceramics can be increased from 55% to 80%, resulting a significantly improvement in energy storage density. Furthermore, loofah-derived SiC ceramic-based thermal storage material with tunable porosity is fabricated by employing loofah sponge as template, the thermal conductivity of the composite phase change material is as high as 20.7 W/(m·K), energy storage density reaches up to 366.7 J/g, enabling high energy density and high power density thermal energy storage simultaneously.