Investigators

Fritz B. Prinz, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University

Objective

This project envisions solar conversion systems where light is converted to electricity via charge separation and transfer through a solid-state electrolyte. The latter occurs through an ultra-thin solid state electrolyte which is capable of conducting redox couples that carry both positive and negative charges without allowing them to recombine within the confinements of the film electrolyte.

To effectively screen feasible material alternatives for this project, efficient computational tools are needed for the down selection process. Therefore this project also aims to develop a computational tool to calculate the electronic structure including the band gap of nano-scale devices with practical computational resources. The simulation tool under development will use a tight binding method that is shown to be fast enough to evaluate relevant systems with reasonable accuracy.