Swansea University's College of Engineering invites applications for a 3 year fully-funded PhD studentship.

This project will offer the opportunity for a graduate student to take part in the development, scale-up, characterization and implementation of new advanced metal oxide materials used for the fabrication of 3^rd generation HOPV solar energy technologies, currently one of the most popular scientific topics in the field of energy. The project will be based at SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre:http://www.specific.eu.com/

In a first phase, the project will concentrate on the development and optimization of metal oxide (mainly titanium and zinc oxide) nanoparticle ink formulations. Conventionally employed industrial deposition and curing techniques such as slot dye coating, ink jet printing, and fast near-infrared radiative sintering will be applied to a range of selected inks. The structural and semiconductor properties of resulting quasi-compact metal oxide films will be assessed using a wide range of analytical instruments, namely electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, Raman-AFM, and SKP-AFM mapping analyses, white light interferometry, etc. The next step of this project will concentrate on the fabrication and testing of small and large organometal perovskite-based and potentially organic photovoltaic devices using electrode substrates provided with quasi-compact metal oxide films. Finally, the impact of residual organics present in metal oxide compact layers on the improved stability of PV devices will be studied using spectroscopic measurements.

Throughout his/her project the graduate student will get opportunities to engage in academic and industrial collaborations with some of our partners. These include the Welsh Printing and Coating centre (WCPC), Imperial College London, and BASF - who already play leading roles in the development and characterisation of photovoltaic technologies on the international academic scene.

The successful student will join an exciting research community in one of the UK's leading engineering departments. The latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), ranked Engineering at Swansea as 8th in the UK overall.