Professor Jens Wenzel Andreasen, DTU Energy, has received an honorary award from the Ingeborg and Leo Dannin's Foundation for Scientific Research.
The grant from the Ingeborg and Leo Dannin's Foundation for Scientific Research consists of a personal award given in recognition of his outstanding scientific contribution as a researcher, and of a research grant for the project “Ultrahigh resolution 3D imaging and modelling of the next generation solar cells”.
"I am incredibly proud and grateful for receiving Ingeborg and Leo Dannin's grant for scientific research," says Professor Jens Wenzel Andreasen, DTU Energy.
"The legacy will finance access to the supercomputer infrastructure that we increasingly need in our calculations of models for the material systems we investigate and for analyzing the rapidly expanding data volumes. Data we in some cases need to be able to analyze in real time, which requires extremely powerful computational resources. "
Jens Wenzel Andreasen primarily research in new materials for solar cell technologies.
"The legacy will finance access to the supercomputer infrastructure that we increasingly need in our calculations of models for the material systems we investigate "
Jens Wenzel Andreasen, Professor, DTU Energy.
Despite more than 40 years of research in alternative solar cell technologies, silicon-based solar cells are still dominant, although silicon is not the theoretically most optimal material and despite the rather energy-consuming manufacturing process. This is partly because materials that are theoretically more promising with higher performance usually proves to be very difficult to manufacture as large-scale solar panels.
"Something goes wrong with the technology transfer from laboratory scale to mass production. I think that the basic understanding of the relationship between the nanostructure of materials and their photovoltaic performance is lacking, and that this is the prerequisite for understanding how the materials are to be manufactured on a large scale, "explains Jens Wenzel Andreasen about his research.
"I address this problem using a combination of newly developed analytical methods and by using computer modeling of the 3-dimensional nanostructure of third generation solar cell materials such as polymer semiconductors and the crystalline structure of inorganic materials such as CZTS (copper zinc sulphide) also known as kesterite."
The 48-year-old Jens Wenzel Andreasen has worked with x-ray scattering and material research throughout his professional life, and he was appointed Professor of Materials Research at DTU Energy last year, where he is establishing the new DTU Imaging Center in collaboration with researchers from DTU Physics, DTU Computer, DTU Mechanics and Niels Bohr Institute.