High Pressure Energy

At the turn of the 21st Century, the critical shortage of abundant, affordable, and clean energy demands greatly accelerated advances in energy research on materials. Incremental progresses are no longer sufficient; out-of-the-box approaches and radically different, novel technologies based on unexpected scientific discoveries will be essential. Although spectacular discoveries often happen serendipitously, we can still maximize the probability of “lucky” discoveries by identifying previously unexplored, fertile ground and establishing a wider platform for investigation. The high-pressure dimension can potentially open enormous new areas of energy research for the next-generation breakthroughs in energy sciences.

High pressure categorically alters physical properties of phonon, electron, and structure and chemical properties of bonding, reactivity, and kinetics. Pressure pushes materials across conventional barriers between insulator and superconductor, fluid and solid, molecular and extended frameworks, and the vigorously reactive and the inert. The extreme P-T studies provide a new route towards discovering advanced structural materials and new materials with enhanced performance for energy transformation (i.e. solar, mechanical, chemical to electrical), energy storage (i.e., batteries, capacitors, hydrogen), and energy transmission, sensing and monitoring.

In HPSTAR, the research is focused on:

  Energy-related discoveries in the vast dimension of high-pressure extreme conditions.

  Recovery of novel high-pressure materials at ambient conditions for energy applications.