Monday, February 27, 2023
10:00 a.m.
Auditorium between B2 and B3
Materials, engineering, and AI for sustainable energy: Accelerating advances in high efficiency lightweight solar cells; and in CO2 capture and upgrade
By Professor Ted Sargent, Northwestern University
Abstract
Our group works on discovering materials, and then developing and studying prototype systems, for:
- Ever-more-efficient solar-to-electricity conversion, at lower cost
- Capturing CO2 from the air in energy-efficient ways
- Transforming CO2 into valuable materials in which it becomes sequestered in the long run.
This work has long relied on materials chemistry, applied physics, and engineering; increasingly we are also levering computational materials science and computational chemistry; as well as machine learning, ideally the learning being done off of the union of experimental laboratory data (acquired in high throughput) and computational data sets.
I will discuss our recent progress in these areas; and also talk about how the glass is (at least!) half-empty: I will argue for the need to accelerated progress in cleantech solutions, and talk about some ways in which, working together, we can progress further, faster.