Materials for energy applications: hydrogen storage/production, solar cells, super capacitors, thermoelectric & carbon based materials

A symposium dedicated to the wide range of materials with a focused application in the field of renewable and sustainable energy, is much needed which can connect the theory and experimental outcome spontaneously. Our symposium will be one such attempt in the field of energy research.

Scope:

Due to simple covalent bonding, carbon shows vivid properties, which can be manifested into the energy applications through different dimensionality like carbon quantum dots, fullerene, carbon nanotubes, two-dimensional graphene and Diamond. They all have enormous applications in the field of solar cells, catalysis, batteries, hydrogen production and hydrogen storage. The ongoing feedback between the experiment and theory concerning energy harvesting opens up new direction of scientific thrust not only in the carbon based systems, but also materials that are attaining interesting electronic, structural, optical and transport properties in order to be applied for sustainable energy resolution. Materials modelling have become equally important along with the experimental investigation to predict such properties, which can be tuned in for different energy applications in the area mentioned above. This is because the atomistic insight of a material is one of the intuitive reasons behind its different properties and this insight we can derive from electronic structure of different materials.

The symposium will not only be limited to carbon materials, but also all other novel materials that have attracted the focus of the scientific community in the vast field of energy materials. The applications of such materials will be having a broad view in the area of solar cell, batteries, photocatalytic water splitting,  hydrogen storage and fuel cells. Scientists doing their research in all the above area will be a getting a common platform to showcase their latest findings, which all will be attached through a common string named Energy. The symposium will be a mixture of theory and experiments with a strong view of bridging the gap between them. The choice of materials is having a wide range from oxide materials to recently synthesized transition metal di-chalcogenides and dimension-wise they can be in bulk, surface, monolayer phase or in form of hetero-structures and nano-composits.

Hot topics to be covered by the symposium:

• Carbon materials of different dimensionalities – present and next generation
• Application of Diamond in Energy Research
• Oxide materials and their application in energy research
• Two-dimensional materials for energy production and storage
• Perovskite based materials for solar cell
• Photocatalytic materials for hydrogen production
• Materials for super Capacitor Technology
• Thermoelectrics
• Heterostructured nano-materials and nanocomposits

List of confirmed invited speakers:

• Zhong Lin (Z.L.) Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
• Chris G. Van de Walle, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
• Kevin Sivula, EPFL - Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
• Maria Lukatskaya, ETH Zurich, Switzerland 
• Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh,  University of New South Wales,  Sydney, Australia
• Wei Luo, Uppsala University, Sweden
• Maurizia Palummo, University Tor Vergata Rome, Italy
• Michael Nolan, Tyndall Natl. Institute, Cork
• Parameswar K. Iyer, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India

Tentative list of scientific committee members:

• T.W. Kang, South Korea
• B. Johansson, Sweden
• C. G.Granqvist, Sweden