Aim of the project / Overview

Key area: hybrid systems with nanomaterials

New concepts for the controlled structuring of materials interfaces as well as the use of new materials for energy transformation and energy storage offer an enormous potential for pushing the utilization of regenerative energies into new areas in the future.

The use of nanomaterials, organic-organic or organic-inorganic hybrid systems, enables completely new concepts and visions of energy transformation and energy storage.

TUM.solar is focusing on research in light-induced energy transformation and energy storage based on these nanomaterials and hybrid systems.

There is a wide range of possibilities, from catalytic processes to low-cost photovoltaics.

The respective basic questions refer to aspects of materials preparation and charge transfer at interfaces. For this purpose, TUM.solar combines complementary investigations by theoretical and experimental research groups in physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering.

Shape and mobility of future generations of solar cells could reach completely new dimensions by the use of new fluid-based production processes.

These promise new possibilities of use, applicable in mobile entertainment electronics as well as in the power production of mega cities.

Furthermore, new materials allow alternative production processes leading to considerably decreased production costs and thus promising future low-cost power production.

A completely different attempt to energy storage, far from nowadays’ energy storage technologies, is offered by photocatalysis.

Here the concepts are new catalysis materials and guided structuring of electrolyte interfaces which help to increase efficiency.

Examples like photo-chemical reduction of carbon dioxide and water splitting are aspects which can direct to the so-called “green technologies”.

Furthermore, the combination of photocatalysis and photovoltaics is expected to generate additional synergy effects.

In integrated systems, the load transformation and the load storage can be directly connected on the nanoscale.

The aimed optimization of symbiotical systems of photocatalysis and photovoltaics instead of individual optimization of independent singular systems is a new attempt and a central goal of TUM.solar.

Thus, research in TUM.solar covers the whole “chain of value creation” from energy transformation up to energy storage and hereby aspects of basic physical-chemical processes up to application-related questions such as the construction of prototypes.

As a part of the “Network of Regenerative Energies” (NRG), TUM.solar is also integrated in TUM.Energy, the faculty-general research project of Munich School of Engineering (MSE).