Sustainable materials and high-performance energy storage play essential roles for our future. Using sustainable natural materials to develop advanced materials and smart devices for future technologies will reduce our dependence on petroleum and enable implantable devices. Based on our research interests and expertise in manufacturing, materials from Nature, energy storage, and paper electronics, our research goal is to explore Nature-enabled multifunctional materials and high-performance energy storage. Meanwhile, we are interested in applying the well-developed and high-speed roll-to-roll paper manufacturing, coating, printing techniques to the emerging advanced manufacturing process.  In the first part of this talk, I will introduce sustainable materials derived from Nature for versatile applications. As examples, we will introduce an ‘antifouling’ porous loofahs sponge with internal microchannels as solar absorbers and water pumpers for thermal desalination and compressible ionized natural 3D interconnected loofah membrane for salinity gradient power generation. In the second part of this talk, I will introduce our studies on flow batteries and all-solid-state batteries.

Nature-derived sustainable materials and high-performance energy storage