Renewable Energies at the ISC

This Week of the 2022 International Science Camp covered several topics about renewable energies and their storage. Researchers from Göttingen's Collaborative Research Center 1073 (CRC 1073) presented their research in this field to our international guests. First of all, concepts for novel solar cells based on TiO2 or perwoskite metal oxide materials were tried out hand on in the lab, but also the storage of the generated electricity was part of this "energizing" week. Together with Dr. Birgit Drabent (XLAB) and Dr. Mona Maaß as well as Philipp Lanfermann (CRC 1073), working Lithium-Ion-Batteries and future Redox-flow-batteries were constructed at laboratory scale and used to store electric. Methods for hydrogen generation based on electrolysis and photocatalysis were discussed and tested, as well as the production of industrial chemicals using CO2 capture via electrosynthetic processes.
The CRC's title "Energy conversion on the atomic scale" was also represented by the investigation of the undesirable energy conversion from kinetic energy to heat, better known as friction. Using an atomic force microscope and transmission electron microscope at the facilities of the Institute for materials Physics of Göttingen University, the international students revealed the different behaviour of friction on the atomic scale compared to our daily macroscopic experciences.