Dialogue@ZJU:With Prof. GAO Xiang, Dean of College of Energy Engineering
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2310120
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2021-04-22
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[Message from the editor: Today (April 22) is Earth Day, an international event celebrated around the world to pledge support for environmental protection. This year’s theme is “Restore Our Earth”. Let’s meet Prof. GAO Xiang, an expert on energy and environmental science and technology, who has been leading his team to develop a system to reduce emissions from fuel combustion.] Quotes from the interview: - For the past 30 years, I have been working on reduction of the emission of s...
ZJU scientists develop soft robot for exploration in Mariana Trench
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/english/2021/0317/c65148a2268191/page.psp
2021-03-15
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The Mariana Trench is the deepest part of the Earth. Without a pressure-resilient “armor”, a man-made machine would be destroyed by the overwhelmingly hydrostatic pressure if it were to venture into this uninhabitable territory. However, deep-sea creatures can thrive at extreme depths thanks to their unique anatomies. If we can draw inspiration from deep-sea creatures, converting the “secret of life” into the “power of machinery”, we will be able to develop intelligent machines that can ad...
Scientists crack open the “black box” of heterogeneous catalysis
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2021-03-09
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Gold has long been known for its chemical inertness. However, when gold nanoparticles are combined with titanium dioxide (TiO2), they will have their attributes altered and promote a variety of catalytic reactions. It is widely accepted that the interface between gold (Au) and a TiO2 plays a critical role in heterogeneous catalysis. Little is known about the dynamic change of the Au-TiO2 interface in real time, thereby rendering it challenging to tune its intrinsic microstructure with atomi...
ZJU scholars discover a novel methane-driven pathway to arsenic transfer
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2229019
/english/2020/1209/c65148a2229019/page.psp
2020-12-09
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Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas which can be found in natural habitats such as wetlands and oceans as well as in artificial systems such as rice paddies and anaerobic digesters. Methane is also an effective biological carbon source and energy which can sustain microbial growth and metabolism, drive biogeochemical cycles of such elements as carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, and promote the evolution and development of the biosphere.Recently, scholars from Zhejiang University, the C...
Large losses of ammonium-nitrogen from a rice ecosystem under elevated CO2
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2212093
/english/2020/1029/c65148a2212093/page.psp
2020-10-29
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Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the global climate has undergone dramatic changes as human activities have continued to stimulate the consumption of fossil fuels, accelerate the pace of deforestation and boost the demand for synthetic ammonia, thereby contributing to the constant increase in greenhouse gas emissions and changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere. On the one hand, global climate change has caused glaciers to melt, sea levels to rise and extreme weather t...
Elevated temperatures influence soil N cycling in the global scale
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2171388
/english/2020/0716/c65148a2171388/page.psp
2020-07-14
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The research team led by Prof. XU Jianming from the College of Environmental and Resource Sources published an article entitled “Elevated temperature shifts soil Nitrogen cycling from microbial immobilization to enhanced mineralization, nitrification and denitrification across global terrestrial ecosystems” in the Global Change Biology on July 2, 2020.Our planet is plagued by severe global warming currently. Since the dawn of the 20th century, the average surface tempe...
Research by ZHANG Xing hailed as one of China’s Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2019
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1966959
/english/2020/0309/c65148a1966959/page.psp
2020-03-09
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The Basic Research Management Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology announced China’s Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2019 recently. With the collaborative efforts of research teams led by SHEN Jianren and KUANG Yanyun from the CAS Institute of Botany, SUI Senfang from Tsinghua University, and ZHANG Xing from the Zhejiang University School of Medicine, the supermolecular organization and function of a huge number of protein subunits and pigments of the PSII-LHCII supercomplex w...
Catalysts with ultrastrong resistance to SO2 deactivation to fill the void in treatment of industrial emissions
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2019-09-05
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A recent student revealed a MnOX /CeO2 nanorod catalyst with an unprecedented performance in the 1000 h test under a low temperature (523 K). This marks a milestone in practical applications in low‐temperature selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOX.Nitrogen is one of the major components of air. Where there is combustion in industry, nitrogen oxides will be inevitably released. Such “hostile” pollutants may bring about an array of environmental problems (such as smog, acid rain, ...
Electricity generated from ocean wave with the frequency of 0.5 Hz
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1285551
/english/2019/0703/c65148a1285551/page.psp
2019-07-03
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The research team led by Prof. ZHANG Dahai at the Zhejiang University Institute of Ocean Engineering and Technology published a research article in the journal of Nano Energy recently. This article is concerned about a multi-grating triboelectricnanogenerator aimed at harvesting low-frequency ocean wave energy.Wave energy is one of the most abundant and widely distributed renewable energy resources in the ocean. Current wave energy converters (WECs) are based on electromagnet...
A new type of catalyst developed to reduce energy costs
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2019-05-13
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As a clean energy source, hydrogen is characterized as pollution-free, high in combustion value and abundant. Water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis. The electric/ photoelectrocatalytic oxygen evolution reaction (OER) process is a complex reaction process involving four-electron transfer, marked by slow-reaction kinetics and high overpotentials, thereby inhibiting the overall energy conversion efficiency. Researchers have developed Iridium-based materials as state-of-...