About State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing

State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing

The State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing is a national research laboratory hosted by Wuhan University of Technology in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Established in 1987 with approval from the State Planning Commission, it officially opened in March 1990 following national evaluation, and it is described by its host university as one of China's premier national key laboratories in new materials. In the 2018 national evaluation of state key laboratories in materials science, the laboratory earned an Excellent rating, confirming its place in the top tier of China's materials research institutions more than three decades after its founding.

Founding and Institutional History

The laboratory's history is tied to the development of materials science at Wuhan University of Technology, whose School of Materials Science and Engineering traces its origins to 1898, when Zhang Zhidong, Governor-General of Huguang, founded the Hubei Academy of Industrial Arts. The school claims two national firsts — China's first silicate-related engineering programme and its first composite materials and engineering programme — and it was from this base in silicates, ceramics and composites that the state key laboratory grew. The present Wuhan University of Technology was formed on 27 May 2000 by the merger of the former Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan Transportation University and Wuhan Automotive Polytechnic University, and the laboratory continued under the merged university.

The laboratory's international standing was built deliberately. In 2008 it was nominated by the Ministry of Science and Technology as a State International Joint Research Center. In 2009 the university established the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory with Harvard University, associated with Charles M. Lieber's group, and the university also hosts an International Joint Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing and discipline innovation bases for introducing foreign expertise in the laboratory's field. Its researchers give its address as 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan 430070, within the university's materials campus.

Leadership

The laboratory has been directed by Qingjie Zhang, with Runzhan Yuan recorded as a co-founder. Zhang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor of the laboratory who served as its director from 2004 to 2017 and as president of Wuhan University of Technology, received his PhD in mechanics of materials and structures from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1990 and undertook postdoctoral research in materials science at the laboratory in 1991 to 1992. His research has covered new energy materials and devices, advanced composite materials and structures, and material micro-nano computation and new materials design, and he served as chief scientist of the National Basic Research Programme of China project on high-efficiency thermoelectric materials and devices from 2007 to 2017. In 2021 Zhang received the Acta Materialia Hollomon Award for Materials and Society, selected by an international panel, in recognition of work connecting materials research to societal needs.

The laboratory's best-known research group of the past two decades is that of Liqiang Mai, whose nanowire energy storage research is based at the laboratory. Mai's group has published extensively on vanadium oxide and other nanowire electrodes for lithium-ion and other batteries, hierarchical heterostructured nanowires for supercapacitors, and related nanomaterials for electrochemical energy storage, including work published in Nature Communications, Nano Letters, Advanced Materials and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The group's presence illustrates the laboratory's shift, within its established composite technologies, toward nanomaterials for energy.

Core Technologies: Gradient, In-Situ and Nanocomposites

The laboratory's identity rests on three core technological strengths, consistently identified in its official descriptions: gradient composite technology, in-situ composite technology and nanocomposite technology. Its research emphasises multi-component, multi-scale and multi-level material composites, guided by principles and design theories intended to drive innovation in emerging materials technologies.

Gradient composite technology produces materials whose composition or structure varies continuously through their volume, so that, for example, a component can be hard and wear-resistant at its surface and tough in its interior, without the sharp interface at which conventional layered materials fail. In-situ composite technology forms the reinforcing phase within the material during synthesis or processing itself, rather than adding a separately made reinforcement, which can produce cleaner interfaces and finer, more stable microstructures. Nanocomposite technology disperses phases at the nanometre scale, where very small additions can transform electrical, thermal, mechanical or electrochemical behaviour. The laboratory's claim to distinction is the development and integration of all three approaches within one institution.

Five Research Areas

The laboratory organises its applied work into five primary areas. The first is advanced composite materials for national strategic projects and key industries — the direct descendant of its founding work for demanding engineering applications. The second is high-performance materials for energy conversion and storage in new energy technologies, the area in which the Mai group's battery and supercapacitor research and the laboratory's thermoelectric work sit. The third is nanocomposite biomaterials for the life sciences. The fourth is information functional materials for information technology. The fifth is emerging materials for transformative technologies, a forward-looking category for materials whose applications are still being defined.

Its specialised research directions mirror this structure: gradient composite technology and new materials; in-situ composite technology and new materials; nanocomposite technology and new materials; frontier materials for transformative technologies; and composite principles and materials design. The last of these — principles and design — reflects the laboratory's computational strand, in which modelling at micro- and nano-scales guides synthesis rather than merely explaining it, a theme prominent in Qingjie Zhang's own research programme.

Energy Materials in Practice

The laboratory's energy research shows how its synthesis technologies are applied. Work from its groups includes silicon nitride ceramics with graded porous structures designed as broadband radome materials for ultra-high-speed applications, combining electromagnetic design with ceramic processing; metal-organic-framework-derived carbon-confined nickel phosphide nanocrystals on graphene for the oxygen evolution reaction, made in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley; antimony nanoparticles confined in three-dimensional carbon networks as high-capacity anodes for potassium-ion batteries; hierarchically self-assembled metal-organic framework networks for continuous ion transport in solid electrolytes; and red phosphorus and carbon anodes for sodium-ion batteries, in which a sulfur co-milling strategy suppressed unwanted white phosphorus formation. The laboratory also operates an open fund system, issuing project grants under its name to researchers elsewhere, including recent projects on battery anode materials — a standard mechanism by which Chinese state key laboratories support work beyond their own walls.

Thermoelectric materials — materials that convert heat directly into electricity and vice versa — formed another major strand, with Qingjie Zhang serving as chief scientist of the national basic research programme on high-efficiency thermoelectric materials and devices for a decade from 2007. Together with the battery, supercapacitor and electrocatalyst work, this gives the laboratory a substantial portfolio across the energy conversion and storage chain, from generation and harvesting to storage and electrochemical use.

Host School and National Platforms

The laboratory is one of five national-level research platforms associated with the university's School of Materials Science and Engineering, alongside the National Engineering Research Center for Optical Fiber Sensing Technologies and Networks and state key laboratories in silicate science and advanced building materials, advanced glass materials, and high-temperature light alloys. The school itself has more than two hundred faculty members and several thousand undergraduate and graduate students, is authorised to grant doctorates in the first-level discipline of materials science and engineering, and operates a postdoctoral research station. It reports twenty-three national science and technology awards across its history and more than one hundred major scientific and technological achievements. The laboratory therefore sits at the centre of a dense materials research ecosystem rather than standing alone, sharing students, facilities and projects with neighbouring national platforms in glass, silicates, sensing and alloys.

Training and Academic Exchange

As with other state key laboratories, training and openness are part of the laboratory's formal role. Its graduate students work within the school's doctoral and master's programmes; its open fund supports visiting and collaborating researchers; and its international joint laboratories and partnerships — with Harvard University and with the University of California, Berkeley among those recorded in its publications — bring foreign collaborators into its projects. Its researchers publish in the leading international materials journals, and its affiliation appears on work ranging from ceramic radomes to sodium-ion battery anodes, evidence of a laboratory whose synthesis and processing remit touches many material classes.

Evaluation and Standing

Periodic national evaluation is the mechanism by which state key laboratories keep or lose their standing, and the laboratory's Excellent rating in the 2018 national evaluation of materials science state key laboratories is its most important recent institutional result. Combined with its 1987 approval, its March 1990 opening, its designation as a state international joint research centre, and the international award recognition of its long-serving director, that rating supports its host university's description of it as one of China's premier national key laboratories in new materials.

Continuing Role

The laboratory's continuing role can be summarised as the integration of synthesis and processing with design. Its founding technologies — gradient, in-situ and nanocomposites — remain its stated strengths; its five research areas carry those strengths into strategic engineering, new energy, biomedicine, information technology and emerging transformative technologies; and its computational design strand seeks to make materials development more predictive. From its base at Wuhan University of Technology, an institution whose materials lineage reaches back to 1898, the laboratory remains a central Chinese institution for the question its name poses: how advanced materials should be synthesised and processed to meet national and scientific needs.