There is not enough energy for the people that are already on the planet. As the
population gets larger the amount of energy that we need to produce as a world
is obviously going to get higher.
Between 2008 and 2035 the world energy
demand is expected to increase by 36%.
So at the present time, there is approximately 1.3 billion
people who are currently without access to electricity.
What we're interested in doing in the
nanoscience lab is finding ways to
make energy production cheaper or more efficient.
So the real challenge is finding a way to bring down the cost
of solar energy so that it's really competitive with other sorts of energy
technology.
Eventually when we do run out of fossil fuels we need to be
prepared to make the switch
as seamlessly as possible.
Brandon MacDonald's a Canadian
who has come to Australia to do research
in nanotechnology.
According to The Age he's been listed as one of the top 100 most
influential people in the city of Melbourne.
He's also won recently the DuPont Award, which is quite prestigious and
brings with it a lot of prestige for both Brandon but also to group and the
work that we're doing here in Melbourne.
You're trying to do things that nobody's done before
and so you spend a lot of your time
learning how to deal with failure, really.
After so many days of failure in a row, it can get quite discouraging and it takes a while
to sort of pick yourself up and get back in there and try something else.
It really taught me the value of just hard work and having to put in the
effort if you want to succeed.
Having success definitely makes it easier to get out of bed in the morning
and come into work and I've also been very fortunate to have a great team of
people
who work with me and around me everyday.
The research that we do in our lab - it's critical that we do it in a
multi-disciplinary environment, like Bio21.
One of the high points of doing my PhD would be,
so the first time we realised that this method
we developed for making solar cells worked, that was really the eureka
moment and everything I've done since has followed on from that event.
Once we make the nano-crystals in solution, we then process them into an ink, which we can deposit onto surfaces such as glass.
So these absorb
the light that enters the cell
and help create the current that we're able to generate.
We use nanoparticles in solar research as foundation for the light absorbing
material and the charge conducting material
in the solar cell and basically we take nanoparticles in solution and
using them as an ink, we can produce many of the layers that you could have
in a typical solar cell.
Brandon MacDonald has focused his efforts recently on cadmium telluride based
solar cell devices and
essentially doubling the previous record efficiency for these types of
materials.
One of the goals of this work is to
simplify the entire process and that should bring down the costs.
It's likely that, we will be able to make cells which are cheap,
light-weight and flexible in the future
and that should extend their applications so they're not just on roof-tops
or in large-scale arrays, but you may now
be able to incorporate them into other things such as solar windows or
backpacks.
The other benefit to using nanoparticle based electronics, is that they can be
printed from sort of typical printing technologies and in doing this we can
actually take the technology out of large-scale production facilities and
actually produce these types of materials anywhere on the planet.
It's never been my goal to be a great scientist. It's actually my aspiration to just
use my knowledge and my skills to try and address some of the big global
challenges
and I think of science as a tool
to try and work towards this.