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>> My name is Dr. Seth Hubbard,
I'm an assistant professor here
at the Rochester Institute of
Technology and I'm also a member
of the NanoPower Research Labs
here at RIT.
The NanoPower research Labs or
NPRL's as we call it is
particularly involved with
aspects of energy conversion,
energy storage, energy
generation and energy
transmission and all of these
aspects of sort of energy we're
looking at the use of nano
materials in general I think
solar cells or photovoltaics
provides some type of option for
renewable energy in this
country.
The sun represents a tremendous
source of power, practically
speaking there's over 600
Terrawatts of energy available
from the sun at any time, if we
can just tap into a small
portion of this we could
potentially be able to create
all the energy that we need.
However, it's not so simple and
the sun goes up and down each
day so there's a lot of
technology that would be needed
in order to do this, we need to
be able to efficiently convert
that energy from the sun and to
be able to do it cheaply, we
also need to be able to store
that energy at night time when
the sun is down and be able to
transmit that energy to
different parts of the country
effectively and so these are
small topics that we look at
here at the NanoPower Research
Lab.
One of these methods is actually
putting nano structures or very
small structures that are on the
order of just a few atoms in
size into the solar cells and so
quantum wells or quantum dots
are all variations of these
types of nano structures.
We utilize quantum dots in our
solar cells by actually
epitaxially
growing these or making these an
integral part of the solar cell
and we do that through our
collaboration with NASA Glenn
Research Center, down in
Cleveland, Ohio.
Once we've actually grown these
quantum dots down at NASA we
bring them back up here to RIT,
we use the semiconductor
Microsystems and fabrication lab
over in the engineering building
to actually produce our solar
cells and put down the contacts
and then we bring them over here
and we actually test them in
this lab and so we look at how
they would work under a
simulated one sun, sunlight
condition.
So since we can't go outside all
the time and have a perfect day
we actually simulate it in the
lab.
The results that we've got using
quantum dots has actually been
very exciting.
We're able to grow quantum dots
in the material into the solar
cell without disturbing the
actual solar cell itself to a
great degree and the quantum
dots actually provide more
current by absorbing more of the
sun's light and actually
converting that into electrical
power.
Just in the last few years
because of the energy crisis
photovoltaics and renewable
energy industry has grown
dramatically, almost at an
expediential rate.
RIT is in a unique position to
provide these industries the
trained scientists and engineers
that they really need.
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