My research areas are in nanostructured energy materials; charge transport/transfer in mesoscopic systems; efficient energy conversion and high energy/power density energy storage in mesoscopic systems, such as nanostructured sensitized solar cells and lithium ion batteries.
In energy conversion/storage systems, while charge transport/transfer, both on the molecular and on the bulk level, are presently fairly well understood, their characterisation on the mesoscopic scale is only at its beginning. These nanoscale charge propagation processes, however, are important to both the frontier of fundamental science and applications to efficient energy conversion and storage devices, such as photovoltaics, photolysis, fuel cells, batteries, electroluminescent and electrochromic displays, etc. With dye-sensitized solar cells as the research platform, our work focuses on the fundamental studies of charge transport in nanostructured systems, such as electron/hole propagation in mesoscopic semiconductor films/interfaces, anion/cation transport in ionic mesoscopic systems/boundaries, and their applications for efficient photovoltaic devices and batteries
