"Thermoelectric Devices for Harvesting Waste Heat"

 

Abstract

Waste heat accounts for over 60% of all the energy consumptions worldwide. New technologies to harvest waste heat present great opportunities to improve energy efficiency and reduce emission. This talk will present additive manufacturing and scalable nanomanufacturing methodologies to fabricate high-performance thermoelectric materials and systems in a scalable, controllable and affordable manner.

This talk will present two research projects on thermal energy harvesting. First, I will talk about our work on high-performance thermoelectric systems for automotive waste heat recovery applications. Second, this talk will present novel additive manufacturing methods to fabricate flexible thermoelectric generators to enable self-powered systems and wearable devices.

Biography

Yanliang Zhang is an associate professor and the principal investigator of Advanced Manufacturing and Energy lab in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at University of Notre Dame. He received Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2011. He is a recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award, an IBM Fellowship awardee, and multiple best paper awards at international conferences. Dr. Zhang’s research has been sponsored by multiple funding awards from U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, DARPA, and industry. He has directed several major multi-institutional research projects. Dr. Zhang’s research work has been published on top scientific journals of high impact, including Nature Materials, Advanced Science, Advanced Materials, Nano Letters, ACS Energy Letters, Energy Conversion and Management, Applied Physics Letters, etc.