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Energy and materials have a long-standing and mutually enriching relationship. In this talk Professor Ploog will show that materials science offers unique possibilities to improve key properties of energy supplies.

In the long term, materials science will help to promote the use of revolutionary new energy resources, such as hydrogen and fusion, and of new energy storage technologies.

Professor Ploog will give a short overview on energy flows and energy cycles and will briefly outline the correlation between energy resources, energy use and environmental impacts (greenhouse gas effect).

He will then discuss some currently used energy resources (coal, oil, natural gas) and the material technology requirements for sustainability. The talk will then move to emerging energy resources (wind energy, solar energy) and the challenges in materials R&D to make these resources viable.

Finally, the material issues of some long term opportunities (hydrogen fuel) and of electrical energy storage will be outlined.

About Professor Klaus Ploog

Klaus H. Ploog is one of the pioneers of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), a versatile tool to fabricate semiconductor and metal nanostructures, which has been established in the 1970s, long before the hype on ‘Nano' started to dominate the word-wide research funding policies in the late 1990s.

Using molecular beam epitaxy, he has designed and fabricated numerous new semiconductor and magnetic nanostructures which have shown unique quantum size effects and which have led to a number of novel device concepts.

This lecture is co-sponsored with the Microelectronics Research Group at UWA and the joint WA IEEE Electron Device/Solid State Circuits/Photonics' Chapter.

The details of the lecture are as follows:
Date: Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Time: 6pm
Location: Webb Lecture Theatre, Room G21, Ground Floor Geography Building
Cost: Free. No RSVP required

For further information please visit the website .

Media references

Magdalena Matuszczyk / [email protected] / 6488 4277