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In: International, Summerstudents

With that statement, I used to begin my day in the blue building of PVcomb… I had the chance to participate with the PV to Fuels Technology group in a project for developing a novel type of hydrogen electrolyzers. These electrolyzers are devices that can use the produced voltage from solar cells to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Therefore, they can enable us to store the solar energy as a chemical fuel, H2; so that we can use it later whenever there is a demand for electricity regardless of the solar irradiance profile over the day. My work is all about simulating newRead More →

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Date: Not important From: Not important                                              Departure at: Not important Destination: Not important                                  Arrival at: Not important Duration: 13h 45min The flight started with much hope, some thoughts and many dreams for what is coming after it lands. It turned out that I should had thought a little about the flight itself in advance. It took only a couple of minutes to figure out that the IndianRead More →

THE ROAD TO ARTIFICIAL PHOTOSYNTHESIS

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In: Energymaterials, International, Students, Summerstudents

As a summer student at the HZB, I am working at the Institute for Solar Fuels on Artificial Photosynthesis research. In the project, I am taking part in, we aim  to improve and characterize two materials, namely BaxMnyOz and MnxVyOz. By using Pulse Laser Deposition (PLD) as the synthesis method, our goal is to investigate the structure and photoelectrochemical properties of these materials by various methods and optimize them towards improving their solar-water-splitting efficiency. This project and research at the Institute for Solar Fuels is based on the search for new light absorbing materials, which can harness the sun’s radiation to produce clean energy from the most abundant resource on earth, water (H2O). This hasRead More →

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In: International, Students, Summerstudents

This year’s Summer Student Program have just began and it’s already being one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had since I chose to make of science my life path. Since the first day you could sense a great mood and an incredible disposition on the students part and also on the program’s organizers. The days have pass and the disposition and the good mood are still evident. Speaking for me now, I’m a Cuban student and this is the first time I leave my country; but, is there a better reason for a scientist to do it other than to meet great people andRead More →

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In: International, Students, Summerstudents

The Summer Student programme is on the way. After the first two weeks, I have had the opportunity to discover, not only my project, but also, the opportunity to meet colleagues from all over the world, and to discover a country and an unknown city to me until now. The title of the project is “Synthesis and tomographic analysis of metallic cellular materials”. The aim of this project is to produce cellular materials of titanium and magnesium with different percentages of porosity and different size of pores, which have potential applications in the replacement of hard tissue. To succeed in this project, I am learningRead More →

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In: Careers, International, Lightsources, Students

“Growing those crystals in the lab is much more tricky than I thought”, Nickie Messini says. “But I really like it as much as the computational analysis for structure refinement!” The young bachelor student from University of Patras, Greece, has already produced some tiny crystals of the protein Endothiapepsin at the MX lab for protein crystallography at BESSY II. It is not easy to force those large Endothiapepsin molecules into the rigid order of a crystal, but Nickie knows how to achieve it. Endothiapepsin crystals are ideally suited as a model system to facilitate the search for new drugs by a method called fragment screening.Read More →