Publication date: 28th August 2024
From solar photovoltaics to batteries to sustainable fuels, many advances in renewable energy technology are enabled by the availability of high-quality functional materials. In the past decade, innovations such as computational materials design and combinatorial synthesis techniques have rapidly expanded our ability to predict new materials, screen for targeted properties, and identify promising candidates to accelerate the energy transition.
However, although the goal of many of these studies is to contribute to global sustainability, rarely do scientists explicitly include sustainability metrics in early-stages of the materials design process. Often, life cycle assessments (LCAs) are not performed until after a material or device has been scaled up to high technology readiness levels (TRLs), at which it may be too late to make significant changes (this is a phenomenon known as “technology lock-in”). The exclusion of life cycle design at early stages is likely not intentional, but rather because we have not yet established the tools and infrastructure to do so, and because of the disconnects between the fields of materials science and life cycle assessment.
In this talk, I will discuss the promises and challenges of integrating life cycle assessment into early-TRL materials design and discovery. I will give a brief overview of what LCA can and cannot do, share tools I have developed to connect the brightway LCA infrastructure to materials design infrastructure, and discuss case studies from my research on inorganic solar materials (focusing specifically on the role of process uncertainty). Lastly, we’ll look towards the future and explore how the materials scientist community can center life cycle thinking in our own research.
nanoGe is a prestigious brand of successful science conferences that are developed along the year in different areas of the world since 2009. Our worldwide conferences cover cutting-edge materials topics like perovskite solar cells, photovoltaics, optoelectronics, solar fuel conversion, surface science, catalysis and two-dimensional materials, among many others.
Previously nanoGe Spring Meeting (NSM) and nanoGe Fall Meeting (NFM), MATSUS is a multiple symposia conference focused on a broad set of topics of advanced materials preparation, their fundamental properties, and their applications, in fields such as renewable energy, photovoltaics, lighting, semiconductor quantum dots, 2-D materials synthesis, charge carriers dynamics, microscopy and spectroscopy semiconductors fundamentals, etc.
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV) is celebrated yearly in May. The main topics are the development, function and modeling of materials and devices for hybrid and organic solar cells. The field is now dominated by perovskite solar cells but also other hybrid technologies, as organic solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, and dye-sensitized solar cells and their integration into devices for photoelectrochemical solar fuel production.
Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics
The main topics of the Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics (IPEROP) are discussed every year in Asia-Pacific for gathering the recent advances in the fields of material preparation, modeling and fabrication of perovskite and hybrid and organic materials. Photovoltaic devices are analyzed from fundamental physics and materials properties to a broad set of applications. The conference also covers the developments of perovskite optoelectronics, including light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.
The International Conference on Perovskite Thin Film Photovoltaics Perovskite Photonics and Optoelectronics (NIPHO) is the best place to hear the latest developments in perovskite solar cells as well as on recent advances in the fields of perovskite light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.