F E A T U R E
F E A T U R E
£6 MILLION FOR NEXT-GENERATION SOLAR TECHNOLOGY
A £6 million award will drive next-generation solar technology into new applications. World-renowned research groups from Swansea University, Imperial College London and Oxford University will collaborate to advance organic and perovskite solar cells into applications that current solar technologies are not suitable for. The performance of these new technologies competes with current options, but they are more flexible and lightweight, cheaper to produce, and can be printed directly onto products during manufacture. This makes them suitable for new applications such as: 5G, which requires ultra-lightweight power sources for pseudo- satellites and high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles; The Internet of Things, for which sensors are embedded into everyday objects; Zero-carbon buildings and vehicles, which could use their roofs, walls and windows to generate power. The award is from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The team will use it to deliver the fundamental science and engineering underpinning these technologies, develop low-carbon, low-cost manufacturing methods to produce them at scale, and build prototypes.
The research programme is called Application Targeted and Integrated Photovoltaics. It will be led by SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre at Swansea University in partnership with Swansea’s new Centre for Integrative Semiconductor Materials, the Centre for Processable Electronics at Imperial College, and Oxford University’s Department of Physics. It also involves 12 industry partners from across the supply chain. Professor James Durrant FRS, from SPECIFIC, who will lead the programme, said: “The fact that the EPSRC has chosen to award this Programme Grant is testament both to the expertise of our team and to the UK’s strength in this field. With these three leading centres working together, we will be able to advance the next generation of solar technologies from the lab to the real world more quickly, for the benefit of the UK and the rest of the world.”
When it comes to flying, the largest of birds don’t rely on flapping to move around. Instead they make use of air currents to keep them airborne for hours at a time. The Andean condor – the world’s heaviest soaring bird, which can weigh in at up to 15kg – flaps its wings for one per cent of its flight time. This finding was revealed in a study which is part of a collaboration between Swansea University’s Professor Emily Shepard and Dr Sergio Lambertucci in Argentina. They used high- tech flight-recorders on Andean condors to log every wingbeat and twist and turn in flight as the birds search for food. The team wanted to examine how birds’ flight efforts vary depending on environmental conditions. Their findings will improve understanding about large birds’ capacity for soaring and the specific circumstances that make flight costly. The researchers discovered that more than 75 per cent of the condors’ flapping was associated with take-off. However, once in the sky condors can sustain soaring for long periods in a wide range of wind and thermal conditions - one bird managed to clock up five hours without flapping, covering around 172 km or more than 100 miles. Dr Hannah Williams, now at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behaviour, said: “Watching birds from kites to eagles fly, you might wonder if they ever flap. This question is important, because by the time birds are as big as condors, theory tells us they are dependent on soaring to get around. Our results revealed the amount the birds flapped didn’t change substantially with the weather. This suggests that decisions about when and where to land are crucial, as not only do condors need to be able to take off again, but unnecessary landings will add significantly to their overall flight costs.” DON’T FLAP CONDOR STUDY SHOWS HOW THEY SOAR
Photographer: Facundo Vital
A flexible perovskite solar cell
Professor Emily Shepard
Ms Nasim Zarrabi, Swansea University, working on solar modules with glove box
10 | Momentum: Research News from Swansea University
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker