By Dr. Abdelhafed Taleb, Sorbonne University, France.
Sorbonne University, France.
Over the last century, the development of nanomaterial science provided new technological opportunities in different fields including energy, environment and health. These developments would surely contribute to the post-fossil energy era. In fact, hybrid nanomaterials are uniquely positioned to offer the possibility to fine-tune their properties, using their size, shape, functionalisation and assembly; in order to fit specific application requirements. These new possibilities are not only limited to the optimization of existing properties but go beyond to introduce and create new properties.
In this context, the energy sector would greatly benefit from these developments and offer new renewable, sustainable and friendly alternatives to fossil resources, which has been proven to be a serious threat to the future of the planet, through its contribution to global warming. In this regard, and due to their properties, nanomaterials have been well explored to improve energy conversion and storage efficiency.
In this presentation, we will introduce the new challenges faced by these new nanomaterials in the energy field. Furthermore, we will review the fundamentals and the most recent developments in the synthesis and characterization of nanomaterials, as well as their applications in the energy conversion by solar cells, and the storage in Li-ion batteries. In addition, we will show how this new class of materials hold the promise of enabling an optimized balance between low-cost, high-efficiency requirements, smart renewable, clean energy harvesting as well as the storage.
Biography
Abdelhafed Taleb is an associate professor at Sorbonne University in the “Institut de Recherche de Chimie Paris” (IRCP / ENSCP), where he is leading the group “Elaboration and Modelling of Nanostructured Films” group. He received his PhD diploma in nanomaterials science under the supervision of Prof. Marie Paul Pileni from UPMC in Paris in 1998. During his PhD, he pointed out a new collective’s properties due to nanoparticles organization. In 2000, he joined the UPMC, where he worked on the synthesis of inorganic-organic hybrid nanomaterials and the development of new strategies to assemble them in different structures of coating. Since 2009, he leads the group focusing on the design of nanostructured films with novel architectures and their applications in different areas such as electrochemical sensing, self-cleaning (superhydrophobic) coating, photovoltaic (DSSC), batteries, anticorrosion coating, magnetic storage supports etc … He has more than 20 years of experience in nanomaterial synthesis, characterizations, the study of their physical properties and their applications. He authored and co-authored a number of publications and patents on various topics, focusing on advanced materials and their applications.