Some Progeresses in Carbon Nanomaterials

Biography：
Jiaxing Huang is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. He received his B.S. degree in Chemical Physics from USTC (2000), Ph.D. in Chemistry from UCLA (2004), and became a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley before joining Northwestern in 2007. In research, his group uses chemical principles and tools to make material innovations for better living. Some recent examples include carbon based materials, clay minerals, and new colloidal materials for energy storage, water treatments and even cosmetics. Through teaching, they aim to develop intuition, unlock creativity and bring the best out of students and themselves. He is included in the lists of Highly Cited Researchers in Chemistry and Most Cited Researchers in Materials Science and Engineering. He is also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the JSPS Fellowship from Japan and the Humboldt Research Award from Germany.
Abstract:
Two recent progresses about carbon nanomaterials will be discussed. The first example advocates viewing graphene-based materials as black pigment. In many engineering applications, such as for transparent conductors, antistatics coatings or polymer composites, the black color of graphene is usually not desirable. However, using graphene as black pigment turns this compromise into a significant advantage. One area that can benefit greatly from this very humble property of graphene (i.e., black color) is hair dye. Using graphene for hair dye not only avoids the complex chemical reaction/diffusion processes involving toxic, small molecular ingredients in the current hair dyes, but also renders new properties of hair for enhanced comfort, such as antistatic performance and improved heat dissipation. Thus graphene based hair dye represents a material solution to a very challenging chemistry problem. The second example is a recent discovery that makes unfunctionalized carbon nanotubes nearly as processable as common plastics, by using a group of phenolic solvents. The new strategy turns powders of carbon nanotube into new polymer solution-like states such as dilution dispersion, thick paste, self-standing gel and a playdough-like material, all of which can be conveniently processed by current material processing techniques to generate desirable structures, form factors and composites.