Highlights

The Renewable Energy MRSEC at the Colorado School of Mines in collaboration with the outreach division at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory held a two week workshop for math and science teachers from public school catering to under-represented minorities.  The teachers were given hands-on experiences for projects in renewable energy to incorporate into their lesson plans.  

Silicon nanoparticles are promising new materials for photovoltaic applications that combine materials property tunability on the nanoscale with silicon’s established performance in photovoltaics. We have succeeded in synthesizing crystalline silicon nanoparticles in a continuous flow plasma reactor and established control over particle size. By carefully tuning the plasma parameters, we have synthesized particles with radial precision of a couple atomic layers and characterized them structurally and optically.

The Renewable Energy MRSEC at the Colorado School of Mines was instrumental in establishing a renewable energy undergraduate minor  that is unique because it features both a renewable energy track and a traditional energy track.  This approach is important because both types of energy will be important for the foreseeable future.

Understanding crack growth behavior in complex materials is critical to material design for damage tolerance.  An advancing crack, by virtue of its stress field, modifies the microstructure ahead of it including include changes in dislocation density, interfaces modification, decohesion of interfaces, void nucleation, and phase transformation .  Such changes in microstructure can in turn have a reciprocal effect on the advancing crack.  The problem is hierarchical in length scale and must be examined at the continuum, mesoscopic and atomic scales.