Biography
Prof. Liwu FAN
Prof. Liwu FAN
Zhejiang University, China
Title: Characterization and screening of sugar alcohols for medium-temperature latent heat storage
Abstract: 
Thermal energy storage is a promising technology for improving the efficiency of thermal energy conversion and management systems. Towards a carbon-neutral world, the research and development of advanced thermal energy storage technology will become more important in the near future. Latent heat storage, featured by relatively high energy storage density and narrow temperature span during operation, has long been considered and practiced as a promising way to store thermal energy. Phase change materials (PCMs), which store and release latent heat upon cyclic phase transitions (mostly solid-liquid phase change), are the key to application of latent heat storage. Various materials, such as water, paraffin wax, molten salts, etc., have been utilized as PCMs over a wide range of temperature from below zero degree Celsius to several hundreds degree of Celsius. The lack of appropriate PCMs makes latent heat storage at 100-200 degree Celsius a great challenge. Sugar alcohols, a class of polyhydric alcohols obtained from hydrogenation of sugars, have often been used as food sweeteners, and have recently been proposed as a good PCM candidate for latent heat storage over the medium-temperature range due to their high latent heat of fusion up to 340 J/g, which is comparable to water. In this work, we performed a systematic characterization of the heat storage and heat transfer properties of the available sugar alcohols (from 4-carbon to 6-carbon ones) and their eutectic mixtures upon consecutive melting-recrystallization cycles, in order to make a screening of the pure and mixture sugar alcohols for practical applications. Molecular dynamics simulations were also conducted to understand, at the atomistic scale, the effect of multiple hydroxyl groups on the thermal properties of sugar alcohols. We then pointed out the direction for future researches towards real-world application of sugar alcohols for highly efficiently latent heat storage over the medium-temperature range.
Biography: 
Dr. Liwu FAN is a Professor, elected to the '100 Talents Program' of Zhejiang University since March 2016, in the Department of Energy Engineering at Zhejiang University. He is the Deputy Director of the Institute of Thermal Science and Power Systems, and is also affiliated with the State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization. Dr. FAN got his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Auburn University on August 2011. Upon graduation, he spent two years from October 2011 to September 2009 to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization at Zhejiang University. He then joined the faculty in the Department of Energy Engineering at Zhejiang University and got promoted to Associate Professor on December 2013. With the financial support by the China Scholarship Council, he went to the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work as a visiting scholar for one year from September 2014 to September 2015. His research interests have mainly been focused on latent heat thermal energy storage, boiling and two-phase flow, and transport in porous media.