MRS collaborates with E-MRS on energy symposia within the 2011 E-MRS Spring Meeting/IUMRS-ICAM Meeting
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MRS collaborates with E-MRS on energy symposia within the 2011 E-MRS Spring Meeting/ IUMRS-ICAM Meeting www.emrs-strasbourg.com
T
he Materials Research Society teamed up with the European Materials Research Society to offer a set of symposia on energy, organized in parallel with the 2011 E-MRS Spring Meeting/International Union of Materials Research Societies-International Conference on Advanced Materials. The Meeting was held on May 9–13 in Nice, France. The energy portion—chaired by David S. Ginley (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA), Sossina M. Haile (California MRS Institute of Technology, USA), Juan R. Morante (Catalonia Institute for Energy Research, Spain), and Abdelilah Slaoui (Laboratoire InESS, France)—comprised 11 of the 27 symposia of the larger meeting, which was chaired by Hanns-Ulrich Habermeier (Max Planck Institute, Germany), Joerg K.N. Lindner (Universität Paderborn, Germany), Giovanni Marletta (Università di Catania, Italy), and Hailing Tu (General Research Institute for Nonferrous Metals, China). The set of energy symposia featured three keynote lectures. The first one was by Anke Weidenkaff of EMPA and the
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 36 • NOVEMBER 2011
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University of Bern who received the inaugural Kavli Foundation Lecture Award given at an E-MRS Meeting. Weidenkaff is enthusiastic about the prospects of thermoelectric power to convert the heat of the sun directly into electricity, but the technology faces many challenges, including energy density, energy storage, and potential scarcity of the elements used in the technology. Her research team is approaching the challenges by investigating the chemical stability of materials at the high temperatures needed to achieve high efficiencies; exploring the means to achieve large thermopower conversion through a better understanding of correlated electronic systems; and achieving low thermal conductivity by hindering phonon transport. The materials used in Weidenkaff’s solar concentrator must be stable in open air at high temperatures, and be able to withstand large temperature gradients. Weidenkaff is investigating very stable perovskite-type oxides with their strongly correlated electrons for this application. Her team is synthesizing a wide variety of perovskite oxides in powder and
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thin film forms by “soft chemistry” (e.g., micelles, sol-gel) methods. Strontium titanate with the formula SrTi1-xNbxO3+δ proved to be too electrically resistive, but the research team discovered that exchanging oxygen with nitrogen increased the conductivity; the same method was used for europium titanate. To reduce the thermal conductivity of perovskite oxides, the researchers increased the phonon scattering at grain boundaries by reducing the particle size. Besides materials for thermoelectric power devices, Weidenkaff is interested in solar production of hydrogen by photoelectrochemistry, using perovskite oxides as photocatalysts. Her research team found that by nitriding LaTiO3.5 to LaTiO2N, this catalyst captured more sunlight
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