Katherine Mazzio: Synthetic manipulation of hybrid organic/inorganic materials for energy conversion and storage

Synthetic manipulation of hybrid organic/inorganic materials for energy conversion and storage

Abstract:
The development of functional hybrid materials based on inorganic colloidal nanoparticles is of great interest for the next generation of energy conversion and storage devices due to the ability to readily tune their physicochemical properties and their potential to replace many traditional bulk materials. The material properties in these colloidal systems can be manipulated by controlling their composition, size, morphology, and surface chemistry. Our efforts focus on directing these properties during synthesis, rather than relying on traditional post-synthetic ligand exchange or bulk mixing processes. This affords us the benefit of achieving better control over the morphology and interfaces in our hybrid and colloidal materials, which enables us to develop a greater understanding of the resulting transport properties when processed into devices. In this talk, I will present several synthetic approaches that we have developed for creating functional hybrid materials, including those based on (i) the covalent attachment of conducting polymers to II-VI nanostructures for optoelectronic applications, (ii) compositional control of chalcogenide/conducting polymer hybrid materials and their resulting thermoelectric properties, and (iii) the solvent-dependent morphological control of colloidal Ge nanoparticles.