UNSW solar engineer Brett Hallam has won the Green Talents award from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and a three-month research placement in Germany.
Held every year since 2009, the Green Talents International Forum honours 25 young researchers from around the world for their outstanding contributions to sustainable development. This year 757 people applied from 104 countries.
For the past 13 years, Hallam has dedicated himself to the field of photovoltaics, much of it at UNSW. As a postgraduate student, he began working on ways to correct defects in silicon solar cells, which can reduce their performance by more than 10 percent.
His key breakthrough was to energise hydrogen in order to increase the efficiency of the solar cell. By applying atomic hydrogen to the surface of the silicon cell, he successfully corrected the defects, improving efficiency and lowering costs.
According to Hallam, the major challenge around using hydrogen in photovoltaic applications is that it naturally goes into a charge state that has low mobility and low reactivity.
"This makes it extremely difficult to passivate some key performance limiting defects in solar cells,” he explained.
Hallam developed an advanced hydrogenation process, which allows the defects to be more effectively and more swiftly corrected. Hallam used light to manipulate the charge state of the hydrogen, and dramatically increase its mobility and reactivity.
Today, the process is being incorporated into solar cell production lines around the world.
Hallam himself has consulted for some of the world’s largest solar power companies, helped fabricate record-setting commercial solar cells, and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics at UNSW.
As part of the Green Talents award, Halla will receive full funding for a three-month research placement in Germany. He’s also been on a two-week science tour around the country, visiting companies and research labs working on issues related to sustainable development, and meeting top scientists in his field.
Thus far, he has seen how Siemens produces gas turbines, collected water samples from the North Sea aboard a research vessel, and studied a supercomputer responsible for modelling the impacts of climate change, as well as a reactor device being used to study controlled nuclear fusion.
Energy will be a major topic of discussion at the Australian Engineering Conference 2016 in Brisbane on November 23-25.