Welcome
About TELab
Welcome to our Thermal & Energy Lab (TELab) homepage!
We are dedicated to conducting fundamental and applied research on thermal energy conversion, aiming to contribute to mitigating the daunting global climate change and energy issues.
To reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, which is considered as one of the causes of global warming, the current energy production paradigm must be shifted from relying on fossil fuels to utilizing renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, water, and waste heat. This shift would also enable us to overcome the energy crisis caused by the depletion of fossil fuels. Since the Paris Climate Agreement in December 2015, the whole world is moving toward this direction. South Korea is also trying to follow the trend, with increasing momentum driven by government, industry, and academia.
Renewable energy resources cannot be utilized in their raw form, so technologies must be developed to convert or store, in carbon-free ways, these raw energy resources to a form of useful energy (e.g., electrical, chemical) that can be utilized directly. Thus, putting effort on research areas such as energy conversion and storage technologies is a key to leading the shift in energy-use paradigms.
In TELab, we conduct diverse research with emphasis on energy conversion and storage technologies. One example is thermoelectric research; we develop new thermoelectric materials and devices that can convert waste heat into electricity with higher efficiencies than the state-of-the-art devices. We also focus on spin thermoelectrics, which is a conversion of heat into electricity through interaction of spin, such as spin Seebeck effect and anomalous Nernst effect. Spin thermoelectrics is believed to provide a deep comprehension of thermoelectrics and various configurations and materials of devices. We also aim to develop a new concept of dissipationless-logic device, dubbed magnon-based magnetic random access memory (magnon-MRAM) as a future storage-class memory (SCM). To accomplish these goal, we investigate the fundamentals of the ‘spin wave (magnon)’ and ‘spin-mediated transport’ effects in magnets and topological materials. We are also interested in developing fundamental technologies for low cost carbon-free hydrogen and syngas production. We find hydrogen not only as a promising clean energy resource, but also as a crucial component for emergent technologies that convert carbon dioxide to various value-added chemicals. In a long term, we plan to conduct research to apply fundamental knowledge developed in our lab, to real world applications, by active collaborations with industry.
Our vision is to grow as a world-leading research group, which could help our country to lead the field of energy technology, and furthermore, help to relieve the environmental and energy crises that the whole world is facing.