EVENT DETAILS
Nano-Materials Engineering for Energy and Sustainability in Civil Infrastructure
The energy crisis is one of the most significant challenges that we face in today's society. More than 80% of the economy relies on fossil fuels coupled with an accelerating growth of global population and greenhouse gas emissions puts our environmental sustainability under threat. To address this issue new materials and technologies for clean energy production and environmental sustainability must be developed. In response to this critical need, Dr. Lu has formed a Sustainable Materials and Renewable Technology (SMART) lab with the mission to advance renewable energy technology through materials related research. This presentation will cover some of SMART lab's efforts on nanostructured materials/ device engineering for a wide range of applications, including thermoelectric energy harvesting, piezoelectric energy production, as well as developing high performance Non-destructive Testing (NDT) sensor for in-situ monitoring of concrete early age properties. Various processing methods will be discussed in this talk including solid state synthesis, liquid phase electrospinning processing, and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) for high crystal nanostructures. Advanced materials characterization techniques will also be presented including high resolution X-ray diffraction (HRXRD), transmission electron microscope (TEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and photoluminescence (PL) etc. The fundamental understanding of process-structure-property relationship of nanomaterials system will be explicitly discussed with regards to their specific applications.
Na (Luna) Lu is an associate professor of the Lyles School of Civil Engineering, the School of Materials Engineering (by courtesy), and Birck Nanotechnology Center at Purdue University. She has extensive research expertise in nanomaterials synthesis, device development and related sensor technologies for structure testing and monitoring. Her research program integrates civil engineering, materials science and electrical engineering discipline with three main topic areas: 1) thermoelectric materials for waste heat recovery, 2) low cost high efficiency piezoelectric sensors for energy harvesting and 3) the integration of nano-devices/sensors for novel non-destructive testing, and civil infrastructure applications. Dr. Lu has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications; 1 book, 4 book chapters, 1 patent and 4 provisional patents. She has given numerous keynote and invited and contributed talks at top research conferences, including Transportation Research Board (TRB), Material Research Society (MRS), The Mineral, Metals and Materials (TMS), SPIE Photonic West and International Conference on Composites/Nano-engineering (ICCE-Nano) etc. Her research work has been featured in national and regional media. She has won several scientific awards, including 2014 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. Dr. Lu is also an entrepreneur who has founded several spin-off companies with the technologies invented at her research lab. Dr. Lu is currently mentoring a research team with 8 PhD students, 1 master and 2 undergraduate students at Purdue University.
TIME Wednesday November 8, 2017 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
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CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney-acott@northwestern.edu
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering