University of Maryland, Department of Materials Science and Engineering                                     

Research Assistant - Lab for Advanced Material Processing

Advisor: Gary Rubloff  

1/2012- present

        

 

ALD nucleation and selective process

• Developed a platinum (Pt) ALD process and explored nucleation behavior of Pt on multiwall carbon nanotubes (CNT), which resulted in a high performance lithium oxygen cathode.

• Achieved selective ALD process of various conductive materials on graphene edges and defects, which electrically heal and stitch defective and separated graphene flakes as a novel transparent conductor.

• Evaluated the doping effect of selectively grown high work function materials on graphene carrier density and mobility by a graphene field effect transistor (FET). 

 

Nanoporous electrical energy storage device

• Accomplished precise control of thin film conformality inside high aspect ratio nano-trenches by fine tuning ALD precursor diffusion inside nano-trenches. Achieved tunable resistance of self-aligned metal nanotube arrays though anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) membranes as scaffold for capacitors and batteries.

• Designed and created self-aligned co-axial nanobatteries inside 150nm wide nanopores by ALD, resulting an array of 2 billion nanopore batteries per centimeter square connected in parallel, which can be fully charged in 12 min with more than 1000 cycle life.

• Analyzed ion diffusion kinetics in ultrathin nanostructured electrodes. Enabled a highly controllable test bed for ion diffusion in confined electrolyte and rational design of nanostructures for high rate battery.

• Achieved high-rate flexible V2O5/CNT paper cathode by hierarchal porosity design of cellulose fiber.

 

Vacuum deposition system design

• Independently designed and built a thermal evaporator integrated to an argon atmosphere glove box, which successfully solved contamination problems for highly air reactive metal (lithium) thin film deposition.

• Built an integrated system of an ultra-high vacuum XPS, two high vacuum evaporators, two ALD reactors and an argon glove box in a team, which enabled sample transfer and in-situ characterization without air exposure. 

 

Wuhan University, Department of Physics                                                                    Research Assistant - Low Dimensional Correlation Electronic System Research Group 

Advisor: Jing Shi and Huijun Liu

9/2008-6/2011

• Synthesized hydroxyapatite modified Ag doped TiO2 nanocomposites by sol-gel method as a visible light- responsive photo-catalyst with 6 times higher photo-catalytic activity than commercial P25 TiO2 powder.

•  Illustrated band structure modification of TiO2 when it is nitrogen and iron co-doped and its enhanced photo-catalytic activity by first-principle calculation using Vienna Ab initio simulation package (VASP) under Linux.

 

University of Science and Technology of China                                                        Research Assistant - Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale

Advisor: Yi Luo

7/2010-9/2010

• Revealed mechanism of gold clusters as catalyst for CO and O2 reaction by calculating adsorption energy of O2 molecule on Au2 -, Au0 and Au2 + clusters and electron transfer between Au cluster and O2 through first-principle method.