Title: Progress in two dimensional materials in energy storage/conversion devices
Biography:
Prof Olabi is the Director of Sustainable Energy and Power Systems Research Centre at the University of Sharjah “UoS”. For the previous three years, he was the Head of Sustainable and Renewable Energy Engineering Department, before joining UOS, he was the director and founding member of the Institute of Engineering and Energy Technologies at the University of the West of Scotland. For the last 35 years, Prof Olabi worked at different national and international institutes such as; National Research Centre-Italy “CNR”, Research Centre of FIAT-Italy “CRF”, Dublin City University “DCU”, Institute of Engineering and Energy Technologies “IEET” at UWS, and Aston University.
Prof Olabi is an Academic Expert Reviewer, he acted as member and chairman for a number of accreditation panels.
Prof Olabi has supervised postgraduate research students (40 PhD) to successful completion. He has published large number of peer-reviewed papers concerning on Renewable Energy and Energy Storage Systems, particularly, hydrogen and Fuel Cell. In the last few years, Prof Olabi has patented 6 innovative projects regarding innovative generation of PEM Fuel Call and Supercapacitor.
Prof Olabi is the founder of the International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Environmental Protection SEEP, www.seepconference.com, and the International Conference on Materials Science & Smart Materials MSSM, www.mssmconference.com. He is the Subject Editor of the Elsevier Energy Journal, Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of Smart Materials (Elsevier), Editor of the Reference Module of Materials Science and Engineering (Elsevier), Editor in Chief of Renewable Energy section of Energies and board member of a few other journals. Prof Olabi has coordinated different National, EU and International Projects. He has produced different reports to the Irish Gov. regarding: Hydrogen and Fuel Cells and Solar Energy.
Abstract:
Two dimensional materials are class of materials that demonstrated interesting properties of high surface area, high electrical, optical, and mechanical properties compared to the base materials. Among the two dimensional materials, graphene, MXene, and metal organic frame works (MOF) demonstrated a high activity in the different energy storage/conversion devices. We have successfully prepared these materials and investigated their activity in different types of fuel cells and supercapacitors. In microbial fuel cells (MFCs), doping of the carbon brush based anode resulted in improving the electrical conductivity and surface that resulted in 10 times increasing in the power output compared to the bare carbon brush.
Also modifying the cobalt electrode with graphene resulted in a superior activity towards methanol oxidation in direct methanol fuel cell. Composite of the MOF and MXene were used to modify the electrodes of the supercapacitor resulted in a significant increase in the energy density of the device. Furthermore, two dimensional metal chalcogenides were successfully prepared and demonstrated a superior activity in direct urea fuel cell and high energy density supercapacitor. The outstanding performance of these materials was related to the high surface area, high porosity, and excellent mass transfer and charge transfer properties.
