Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering
187 Material Research Laboratory |
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Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering
187 Material Research Laboratory |
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VitaeProf. Qiming Zhang’s research area is in novel electronic materials, especially soft electronic materials and ferroelectric based materials, and their device applications. The research conducted in his group covers a broad range of applications of solid state electronic materials such as electromechanical, dielectric, photonic and electro-optic, and pyroelectric applications. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institute of Health, and many industrial companies.Research Areas: • Novel electroactive polymers and polymer systems: Material designs, synthesis, and characterization. Making use of molecular and electronic phenomena in polymer and organic materials, novel electroactive polymeric material systems are designed and fabricated. Recently, his group has developed electroactive polymers which exhibit a dielectric constant near 1,000 and can generate strain of higher than 13% with elastic energy density near 1 J/cm3 under a relatively low applied field. • Electromechanical materials and devices: actuators and sensors, transducers, and micro-electromechanical systems, energy harvesting. Based on the high performance electroactive polymers and composites developed, various solid state electromechanical devices are investigated, including MEMS, artificial muscles, energy harvesting, and micro-sensors. • Dielectric materials and devices: electronic packaging, capacitors, electric energy storage. The most recent work in this area is the PVDF based high dielectric constant terpolymers (room temperature dielectric constant>60) and 0-3 composites which are suitable for high electric energy density storage capacitors. • Photonic structures, electro-optic and acousto-optic materials and devices. Research work in photonic structures focuses on the micro-machined tunable photonic crystals for reconfigurable waveguide and tunable optic filter for optic communications. • Pyroelectric materials and devices. The research work in this area is mainly based on the relaxor ferroelectric polymer ultra-thin films developed in Prof. Zhang’s research group which shows high pyroelectric properties over a relatively broad temperature range. • Ferroelectric polymer thin and ultrathin films, ink-jet printing of organic active devices, nano-materials and devices based on functional polymers. |
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