Renewable Energy
Applied and Engineering Physics faculty play an active role in the leadership and implementation of renewable energy research on campus, both through individual research programs, the collaborative centers on campus, and at partnering national laboratories. The department’s interests in the physics of renewable energy range from world-leading fundamental studies intended to understand the underlying mechanisms and ultimate limits of new technologies to applied research that ensures their practical and efficient implementation.
For example, semiconductor nanocrystals offer significant potential for efficient, solution-processed (i.e., low cost) photovoltaic devices. The optical properties of nanocrystals can be engineered through their size via quantum confinement effects. They can be tailored to absorb the solar spectrum optimally, for example, and the absorption of a single photon of light may create more than one pair of charge carriers in a nanocrystal. In collaboration with Prof. Tobias Hanrath of Chemical Engineering, Frank Wise is investigating the fundamentals of charge transfer from nanocrystals. The Hanrath-Wise team has demonstrated nanocrystal-based solar cells with among the highest efficiencies reported.
Cornell's Energy Materials Center (EMC2), funded by the Department of Energy, focuses on understanding and controlling the nature, structure, and dynamics of reactions at electrodes in fuel cells, batteries, supercapacitors, solar photovoltaics, and catalysts. Joel Brock and David Muller lead the thrust on “Atomically-engineered materials for energy generation, conversion, and storage via complex oxides.” The thrust seeks to design, fabricate and characterize, atom-by-atom, new artificial materials that have no bulk counterparts and whose properties can be tailored to meet the competing demands of energy applications. Craig Fennie’s group uses quantum-mechanical theory and computation to invent and predict the properties of new materials system that can be grown by the group. The thrust is also developing and applying novel experimental tools for probing the dynamics and kinetics of structure and chemistry at interfaces, in films and in working devices. An ultimate goal is to establish opportunities for – and fundamental limitations of – energy generation, conversion and storage technologies.
FACULTY AND THEIR RESEARCH INTERESTS IN THIS AREA:
| Joel Brock Professor, Applied and Engineering Physics, AEP in-situ x-ray studies of renewable energy materials |
| Harold Craighead Charles W. Lake, Jr., Professor of Engineering, AEP biofuels |
| Craig Fennie Assistant Professor, School of Applied and Engineering Physics, AEP theoretical prediction and design of new materials and states for energy conversion |
| David Muller Professor, Applied and Engineering Physics, AEP atomic-scale physics, characterization and design of fuel cells, batteries and renewable energy materials |
| Frank Wise Professor, Applied and Engineering Physics, AEP quantum dot solar cells |
| Lena Fitting Kourkoutis Assistant Professor, Applied and Engineering Physics, AEP photovoltaics |
| Francis DiSalvo Professor, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Director of the Atkinson Center for Sustainability fuel cells, batteries |
| Emmanuel Giannelis Walter R. Reed Professor of Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Director of the KAUST Center for Energy and Sustainability nanomembranes ionic liquids for fuel cells, batteries, water purification |
| Tobias Hanrath Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering batteries and quantum dot photovoltaics |
| Richard Robinson Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering nanoscale thermoelectrics |
