REU Site: Solar energy research for the terawatt challenge

TY - JOUR

T1 - REU Site

T2 - 124th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition

AU - Holman, Zachary

AU - Jordan, Michelle

AU - Husman, Jenefer

AU - Fisher, Kate

AU - Rowlands, Tiffany

N1 - Funding Information: Jenefer Husman received a doctoral degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1998. She served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama from 1998 to 2002, when she moved to Arizona State University. In 2008 she was promoted by ASU to Associate Professor. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Educational Studies Department at the University of Oregon. Dr. Husman served as the Director of Education for the Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technology Center - an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center from 2011-2016. Dr. Husman is an assistant editor of the Journal of Engineering Education, and is a member of the editorial board of Learning and Instruction. In 2006 she was awarded the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER grant award and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the President of the United States. She has conducted and advised on educational research projects and grants in both the public and private sectors, and served as an external reviewer for doctoral dissertations outside the U.S. She publishes regularly in peer-reviewed journals and books. Dr. Husman was a founding member and first President of the Southwest Consortium for Innovative Psychology in Education and has held both elected and appointed offices in the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Motivation Special Interest Group of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction. Funding Information: Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Richard Smalley recognized the need to produce abundant, clean, low-cost, energy as the greatest challenge of the 21st century. Coining this opportunity as the global “Terawatt Challenge,”1 Smalley challenged scientists and engineers to develop sustainable technologies to meet the world’s growing energy demands. The Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies (QESST) Engineering Research Center is taking up this challenge. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, QESST’s mission is to generate innovative photovoltaic solutions for sustainable electricity generation. QESST’s interdisciplinary team consists of faculty and students from eight universities, joined by leaders from world-renowned companies and leading photovoltaic entrepreneurs. Funding Information: In a collaboration between QESST and NCI-SW, one REU team worked on a project that pertained to both nanofabrication and solar cells. The students developed a process for texturing silicon wafers with nano-sized pyramids for enhanced light trapping and reduced contact resistance to certain metallization schemes. This project was performed in conjunction with QESST partners at CalTech, and is also expected to result in a publication. Besides the projects pertaining to solar cells, two projects related to processes further down in the manufacturing chain were also successfully completed—one to develop a novel module lamination technique and one to determine the impact of recycling on the lifecycle of photovoltaic modules. The lamination project was part of a QESST associated project funded by ARPA-E. The aim of the project was to develop a hybrid photovoltaic/concentrated solar power trough collector which employed a polymer film within the laminate. The aim of this REU project was to determine if laminating the film to the substrate at only a few points could result in a laminate with sufficient adhesion to withstand field conditions. The students learned how to measure peel strength and designed an experiment to find the optimal size and density of the connection points. The students involved in the recycling project did almost the opposite. Their objective was to find a method to release laminated layers from the substrate using the minimum amount of energy possible. They tested chemical, ultraviolet, and thermal methods of delamination and found that thermal cycling was more effective than the current state of the art. They also determined the amount of energy required for the thermal delamination process.

PY - 2017/6/24

Y1 - 2017/6/24

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85030551029&partnerID=8YFLogxK

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M3 - Conference article

SN - 2153-5965

VL - 2017-June

JO - ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings

JF - ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings

Y2 - 25 June 2017 through 28 June 2017

ER -