Hauptseminar: Green Energy Seminar – Overview

Rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and the depletion of fossil fuel reserves raise serious concerns about the ensuing effects on the global climate and future energy supply. Utilizing the abundant solar energy to produce electricity or to drive artificial photosynthetic reaction to convert water and carbon dioxide into fuels are potential solutions to both energy harvesting and storage. The Seminar will cover five main topics. Firstly, the current status of the research in batteries will be discussed, together with the role of the batteries in balancing the electricity grid and the impact on the grid architecture. The second part will cover solar cells: architecture, light harvesting, charge separation, efficiency limitations, new materials and methods to overcome the Shockley-Queisser limit.

The third part will cover efficient light emission based on inorganic and organic nanoparticles. The fourth part will focus on the passive radiative cooling to eliminate the need for energy consuming current air conditioning approaches. The last, extensive, part will cover natural photosynthesis, in particular light harvesting and charge transport. The fourth part will focus on heterogeneous solar fuel generation with nanocrystalline semiconductor particles, starting from thermodynamic and kinetic aspects of photocatalysis, through photosensitization to semiconductor-based photocatalysts for hydrogen generation via water reduction, full water splitting and carbon dioxide reduction. The architecture, limitations and figures of merit for photocatalytic and photoelectrocatalytic systems will also be discussed.

The seminar addresses in particular master students which have followed the lecture Advanced Solid State Physics (EM1) or Optoelectronics, but is not exclusively for these students.

Seminars

Given the current situation, the seminars will likely start in an online format, with presentations given by the students via Zoom or related software. As soon as possible the seminars will return to the regular format of meetings in a conference room in the Nano Institute Munich.

The introductory presentation from the seminar on 22.04.2020 is available as a PDF file.

Please note the seminars will start at 15:45 (later than initially announced) and are projected to take up to 90 minutes. Please contact the tutor if this change causes conflict with other obligations.

Planned topics

Most of the topics have been assigned (updated version), there are still some open topics from topics 5-7.

1. Electricity grid, renewable vs non-renewable source – 29.04.2020)
2. Batteries (Li ion, Li-O, Li-S) – 06.05.2020
3. Silicon solar cells, case study of solar panel use – 13.05.2020
4. Thin film and organic solar cells – 20.05.2020
5. Perovskite solar cells – 27.05.2020
6. Overcoming Shockley-Queisser limit (upconversion, triplet-triplet annihilation)
7. Overcoming Shockley-Queisser limit (multiexciton generation, singlet fission)
8. Efficient light emission: quantum dots and carbon dots
9. Nighttime photovoltaic cells and IR emission
10. Radiative cooling
11. Natural photosynthesis and lessons to be learned
12. Photocatalytic H₂ generation and water splitting
13. Photocatalytic CO₂ reduction

Students are encouraged to provide a list of preferred topics for their presentation. By default, there will be 2 talks per seminar. If more than 24 students enrol for the seminar, additional topics will be proposed and selected seminars will have 3 talks.

The seminar will be credited if:

(a) a presentation is given,
(b) all presentations (missing 3 at most) have been attended,
(c) the student actively participated in discussions

Tutors:

Dr. Jacek Stolarczyk, email: jacek.stolarczyk(at)physik.uni-muenchen.de
Prof. Dr. Jochen Feldmann, email: feldmann(at)lmu.de