HZB-postdoc Feng Liang becomes associate Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University
Dr. Feng Liang has secured an associate professorship at the Green Hydrogen Innovation Center in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. He will start to build up his research team in June 2025. © HZB
Dr. Feng Liang has joined the HZB Institute Solar Fuels in 2021. Now, he has secured an associate professorship at the Green Hydrogen Innovation Center in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. He will start to build up his research team in June 2025.
Dr. Feng Liang has earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, in a joint training programme with RWTH Aachen. In October 2021, he joined the Institute Solar Fuels on a Helmholtz-Innovation Pool project. He is developing cutting-edge prototypes for water-splitting devices that can operate at higher than ambient pressures up to 8 bar.
The design of functioning prototypes demands skills from different disciplines, not only device engineering but as well a deep understanding of materials science and electrochemistry. “I learned most of the electrochemistry here from Fatwa Abdi and Roel van de Krol”, Liang says. “They were the best mentors I could ever imagine”.
Feng Liang has secured an associate professorship at the Department of Mechanical Engineering in Xi'an Jiaotong University. He will leave HZB after helping his colleagues prepare for the "programme oriented funding" evaluation in May.
“From June 2025, I will start my own group in China, and I'm excited about the prospect of a close partnership with HZB in the future”, he says. Liang will continue his work on prototypes for water splitting. Roel van de Krol, director of the Institute for Solar Fuels, praised Feng Liang's achievement, saying: “It's wonderful to see that his work at HZB has led to an associate professorship; it's a great example of how HZB provides a supportive environment for early-career researchers to develop their careers”.
- Berlin Science Award goes to Philipp AdelhelmBattery researcher Prof. Dr. Philipp Adelhelm has been awarded the 2024 Berlin Science Award. He is a professor at the Institute of Chemistry at Humboldt University in Berlin (HU) and heads a joint research group at HU and the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB). The materials scientist and electrochemist is investigating sustainable batteries, which play a key role in the success of the energy transition. He is one of the leading international experts in the field of sodium-ion batteries.
- Long-term test shows: Efficiency of perovskite cells varies with the seasonScientists at HZB run a long-term experiment on the roof of a building at the Adlershof campus. They expose a wide variety of solar cells to the weather conditions, recording their performance over a period of years. These include perovskite solar cells, a new photovoltaic material offering high efficiency and low manufacturing costs. Dr Carolin Ulbrich and Dr Mark Khenkin evaluated four years of data and presented their findings in Advanced Energy Materials. This is the longest series of measurements on perovskite cells in outdoor use to date. The scientists found that standard perovskite solar cells perform very well during the summer months, even over several years, but decline in efficiency during the darker months.
- Sodium-ion batteries: New storage mechanism for cathode materialsLi-ion and Na-ion batteries operate through a process called intercalation, where ions are stored and exchanged between two chemically different electrodes. In contrast, co-intercalation, a process in which both ions and solvent molecules are stored simultaneously, has traditionally been considered undesirable due to its tendency to cause rapid battery failure. Against this traditional view, an international research team led by Philipp Adelhelm has now demonstrated that co-intercalation can be a reversible and fast process for cathode materials in Na-ion batteries. The approach of jointly storing ions and solvents in cathode materials provides a new handle for designing batteries with high efficiency and fast charging capabilities. The results are published in Nature Materials.