Designing and Manufacturing Optical and Thermal Metamaterials for Large Scale Energy Applications by Xiaobo Yin

Abstract: Micro/nano-structured materials offer significantly new opportunities for high efficiency devices and systems for energy harvesting, conversion and storage. Fundamental understanding at the small scale enables us to design structures and materials with unprecedented performances.  However, there is a tremendous gap between the proof-of-principle demonstration at small scale and the intrinsically large scale real-world thermal and energy systems. As one example, energy use for cooling is poised to increase dramatically over the next several decades. In this talk, I will give an overview on our research and, more specifically, present our recent development on thermal radiation control for large scale cooling applications. We demonstrated the scalable manufactured hybrid glass-polymer composite with extreme light-matter interactions provides a 24/7 continuous cooling power of 110 W/m2 without consuming electricity or water.

Biosketch: Dr. Xiaobo Yin received his PhD from Stanford University in 2008 and is currently the Bruce S. Anderson Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on nanostructured optical materials, radiative heat transfer, high temperature materials, and scalable manufacturing. He authored and co-authored more than 80 journal publications with ~ 9,000 citations. His works have been featured on numerous media outlets including Nature, Science, Physics Today, Scientific American, the Economists, and Forbes. He is a recipient of the 2015 DARPA Young Faculty Award, the 2017 Moore Inventor Fellowships, and the 2017 Kavli Foundation Early Career Lectureship of Materials Science. His recent work on passive radiative cooling was named as one of the top 10 breakthroughs of year 2017 by Institute of Physics (IOP) Physics World and the top 10 most reviewed news by the Economists.

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Apr 17, 2018
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Location:
38-138 Engineering IV
420 Westwood Plaza Los Angeles CA 90095