Publication date: 31st March 2013
The increasing need for carbon free energy has focused renewed attention on solar energy conversion. Although photovoltaic cells excel at directly converting of solar energy to electricity, it does not directly produce stored energy or fuels that account for more than 75% of current energy use. Direct photoelectrolysis of water has the advantage of converting solar energy directly to hydrogen, an ideal non-carbon and nonpolluting energy carrier, by replacing both a photovoltaic array and an electrolysis unit with one potentially inexpensive device. Unfortunately no materials are currently known with the required properties to efficiently photoelectrolyze water that are stable under illumination in electrolytes for many years. Nanostructured semiconducting metal oxides could potentially fulfill these requirements, making them the most promising materials for solar water photoelectrolysis, however no oxide semiconductor has yet been discovered with all the required properties. We have developed a simple, high-throughput combinatorial approach to prepare and screen many complex oxides for water photoelectrolysis activity. The approach uses ink jet printing of overlapping patterns of soluble metal oxide precursors onto conductive glass substrates. Subsequent pyrolysis produces metal oxide phases that are screened for photoelectrolysis activity by measuring photocurrents produced by scanning a laser over the printed patterns in aqueous electrolytes. Several promising and unexpected compositions have been identified. We are in the process of optimizing and understanding the physical structure, electronic structure and catalytic ability of some of these new photocatalysts. In addition, due to the millions of possible combinations to be printed and screened, we have developed a distributed research project that uses simple and inexpensive printing and screening devices, such as Lego Mindstorm® kits, to enlist many undergraduate and high school student researchers into the search for the “Holy Grail” of materials. The Solar Hydrogen Activity research Kit or SHArK project has now expanded to over sixty sites.
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.