Holger Kleinke

Professor, Chemistry; Director of Collaborative Graduate Program in Nanotechnology

Research interests: inorganic nanomaterials; solid state chemistry; thermoelectric energy

Biography

Professor Kleinke joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo in 2000. He serves as Editor for Journal of Alloys and Compounds, and is a member of the editorial boards of Advanced Electronic Materials and of Journal of Solid State Chemistry. Kleinke received the Premier’s Research Excellence Award in 2000, and the Ontario Distinguished Researcher Award in 2002, and held a Canada Research Chair (tier II) in Solid State Chemistry from 2001 - 2011.

Education

PhD, Universitat Mainz, Germany
Vordiplom, Diplom, Chemistry, WWU Münster (Germany)

Holger Kleinke

Research

Research focus

Holger Kleinke's research focuses on finding and optimizing new thermoelectric materials. Thermoelectrics are capable of converting heat into electrical energy and vice versa. This environmentally friendly energy conversion currently has several applications, but is limited by its low efficiency. His research group is attempting to increase the efficiency so that thermoelectrics may be used to recover electricity from the nowadays abundant waste heat, e.g. in the exhaust of automobiles.

About the Kleinke laboratories

The Kleinke laboratories include 30 high temperature furnaces, a high temperature powder diffractometer with position sensitive detector, a combined high temperature Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC)/TG for thermal analysis, a commercial apparatus that simultaneously determines the thermopower and the electrical conductivity and an apparatus to determine the thermal conductivity.