On July 15th, Prof. CHENG Huiming, Head of the Advanced Carbon Materials Division of Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science (SYNL), received the American Carbon Society 2010 Charles E. Pettinos Award in Clemson University, USA.

Prof. Cheng has contributed much to the progress of carbon nanotubes, carbon materials for energy storage, and recently graphene materials. He has published near 300 scientific papers and been awarded numerous patents. While Prof. Cheng is perhaps best known for his research work on carbon nanotubes, he has also been very active in many other aspects of carbon materials and has recently made significant contributions to the science of graphene and to the use of various carbon materials for energy storage.

Prof. Cheng did pioneering work on large-scale growth of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) using an improved floating catalyst method in 1998. Since then he has extensively investigated their synthesis, growth mechanism, structural characteristics, properties, and applications. In 2009, he made an important advance in the synthesis of carbon nanotubes when he proposed a metal catalyst-free process to synthesize SWCNTs. He has also investigated ways to control the number of layers of grapheme, to tailor graphene into nanoribbons, and has proposed a total color difference method as well as a surface-Interference co-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to characterize graphene. In addition, Prof. Cheng has recently been involved with the use of CNTs, graphene and porous carbons for supercapacitors and lithium ion batteries.

The Charles E. Pettinos Award, sponsored by the Charles E. Pettinos Foundation and the American Carbon Society, is an international award given triennially to a person in recognition of recent outstanding research accomplishments in the field of carbon science and technology.