Conveners
Focus Session: Emerging Materials and Physics for Energy Conversion
- Gunther Andersson
- Dehong Yu (Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation)
Focus Session: Emerging Materials and Physics for Energy Conversion: Focus Session: Emerging Materials and Physics for Energy Conversion
- Gunther Andersson
- Dehong Yu (Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation)
Traditional thermoelectric research faces persistent challenges arising from inherent trade-offs among the Seebeck coefficient, electrical conductivity, and thermal conductivity. Despite extensive efforts through doping, alloying, and microstructural modifications, the figure-of-merit (ZT) of modified single-phase thermoelectric materials remains well below the theoretical Mahan–Sofo limit of...
Cooling technologies are essential for health and comfort worldwide, yet conventional vapour-compression systems are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions arise from both the low energy efficiency of the cycle and the leakage of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants, which have very high global warming potentials. As demand for air-conditioning accelerates in a...
A large fraction of global primary energy is dissipated as waste heat, motivating the search for materials that can directly convert heat to electricity via the Seebeck effect. Tin selenide (SnSe) is a leading thermoelectric candidate due to its ultralow lattice thermal conductivity and favourable electronic structure. Beyond conventional optimisation strategies such as doping or alloying, the...
Photocatalytic water splitting is a promising technology for using solar energy to produce directly hydrogen (green hydrogen (GH2)), GH2 is considered to as environmentally friendly and renewable energy based fuel. However, only a few semiconductor materials have been developed as efficient photocatalyst, amongst them photocatalysts based on Al:SrTiO3.(1) A typical photocatalyst consists of...
Atomic vibrations on the terahertz (THz) scale play a central role in determining a material’s optical, electronic, thermal, and mechanical properties. In particular, the coupling between vibrational dynamics and thermal transport or phase transitions offers opportunities to design materials for efficient energy conversion and storage.
This presentation will highlight recent work...
Photocatalytic water splitting allows producing green hydrogen without the need to be connected to the electric grid. Photocatalysts absorb light and generate electron hole pairs. Provided that the energy levels of the valence band and conduction band are positioned below and above the energy levels required for the oxygen and hydrogen evolution reaction, respectively, the absorbed light...
