• Question: Are you working on any new ways of createing energy?

    Asked by 579enek22 to Yang, Stephen, Shane, Karla, Emma on 13 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Emma Hanley

      Emma Hanley answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      I am not looking at new ways of creating energy. My research is looking at what types of energy and technologies we will use in the future in a low-carbon energy system

    • Photo: Stephen Rhatigan

      Stephen Rhatigan answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      There is such a thing as the Law of Conservation of Energy which says that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed from one form into another.
      So at best we can work on ways of transforming energy into forms that we can use.
      This can be:
      – converting wind energy into electricity using wind turbines.
      – converting solar energy into fuels using photocatalysts, or into electricity using solar panels.
      – converting matter to energy (nuclear reactions).
      I’m working on a method for transforming solar energy into a fuel but it’s not new. Scientists in Japan showed how it works in the 1970’s. But so far it’s not very efficient so I try to find a material which does the transformation efficiently.
      That means I am looking for a material which can convert the most amount of solar energy into fuel.

    • Photo: Karla Dussan

      Karla Dussan answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      I am myself working on transforming organic matter into gas or liquid fuels suitable for transport and heat/electricity generation through chemical reactions. There are so many ways to do it, and many has been explored. My work focuses mostly on understanding and studying these reactions so that 1) we can carry out the reactions efficiently (that is, getting the most energy out of the process), and 2) we can obtain the best gas/liquid fuel quality out of it. Even though these are chemical reactions and processes that have been known for years, organic materials are so diverse and with different compositions, that we need to understand more about the fundamentals of how the components of these materials react and interact during the chemical reactions.

Comments