Abstract
Intersection between combustion and nanotechnology offers exciting opportunities to provide mutual benefits for both areas. Previous combustion research related to nanotechnology has primarily focused on the synthesis of nanoparticles (NPs), combustion of Al NPs and soot formation. Nevertheless, nanotechnology, in the past decade, has achieved significant progress in the area of one-dimensional (1-D) nanomaterials, such as nanowires (NWs) and nanotubes (NTs), and the high aspect ratios of these 1-D nanomaterials offer additional benefits of isotropic properties in comparison to NPs. 1-D nanomaterials have already made great impact on many areas, ranging from energy conversion systems, electronic and optical devices, to biological sensing and health monitoring systems, but, to a much less degree, on combustion. This talk will present three examples of our efforts in bridging combustion and 1-D nanomaterials. First, we developed several flame synthesis methods to synthesize, decorate or dope 1-D metal oxide nanomaterials and these methods exhibit advantages of fast growth rates, high purity and crystallinity materials, versatility, scalability and low-cost. Second, we applied 1-D transition metal oxides to catalyze the oxidation reactions of hydrocarbons. These 1-D nanostructured catalysts compared to the supported NPs, exhibit comparable or even better catalytic activity and stability, great flexibility in increasing the catalyst loading, and convenience in tuning the surface chemistry. Finally, we investigated the ignition of a new 1-D nanostructured thermite, i.e., CuO/Al core/shell nanowires (NWs). Such 1-D core/shell NW thermites, compared to NP-based thermites, exhibit similar on-set temperatures for the exothermic reaction, but greatly improved mixing uniformity and reduced activation energy for the thermite reaction.

Bio
Xiaolin Zheng is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University (2006), B.S. in Thermal Engineering from Tsinghua University (2000). Prior to joining Stanford in 2007, she did her postdoctoral work in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. Her research interests lie at the interfacial science involving chemistry, nanomaterials, thermofluidics and electronic devices. She is a member of MRS, ACS and combustion institute. She received the Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) from the white house (2009), Young Investigator Awards from the ONR (2008), DARPA (2008), Terman Fellowship from Stanford (2007), and Bernard Lewis Fellowship from the Combustion Institute (2004).

Please see the Colloquium Announcement for more details.

An informal coffee & cookie reception will be held prior to the lecture at 2:30 p.m. in the AAE/ARMS undergraduate lounge (directly in front of ARMS 3rd floor elevators).