Solar technologies can be fabricated from earth abundant materials to fit a huge variety of applications.
During the summer of 2018, I worked as an Undergraduate Researcher for Christine Luscombe in her lab within the Clean Energy Institute. As a member of the Organic Photovoltaic Fiber Team, I worked alongside 2 other undergraduates to streamline and optimize a fiber coating process for producing wires coated in layers of different solutions. Organic Photovoltaic Fiber is basically what you could think of as "Solar String." As my first real research experience, I can soundly say it was time well spent, and I look forward to continuing to work on the project in the future.
Application
Summarize your proposed experiential learning activity, including the primary focus of your activity, your intended actions, and the expectations of your supervisor and/or organization/partners.
This summer I will be participating in Organic Photovoltaic Fiber Instrumentation Research in the Christine Luscombe Lab in the UW Clean Energy Institute. Building on a process and mechanism designed by past students who have moved on, I will be working under a current Senior who is the project lead. We will be focusing on streamlining the fabrication of fiber strands made of organic materials that have the ability to harness the energy in sunlight and convert it to usable electricity (Organic Photovoltaic Fibers, or OPVF). Throughout the course of my involvement, I will gain exposure to various technologies and techniques necessary in the engineering field today.
Explain how your activity demonstrates the values of the Honors Program Experiential Learning area you selected. Rather than reiterating our definition, outline how your activity embodies this definition.
I will be demonstrating the values of the Research Honors Program Experiential Learning Area by participating in research applicable to a potential career path. I will be working with 2 other undergraduates, both who are in the Materials Science Department. I believe that this experience will offer an interesting cross section with my chosen field, Chemical Engineering, through focusing on the same topic: clean technology. I hope to gain useful insights into how material scientists and engineers approach problems, and gain information that I'm sure will be applicable to my chemical engineering coursework, and at the very least will offer another perspective. I see this as a valuable interdisciplinary opportunity to grow as an engineer.
How and why did you select this engagement? What skills or experiences do you hope to gain from it?
I sought out this opportunity because I believe it is a first step towards my future and career goals in clean energy technologies. After deciding to pursue the field this past year, I first decided on a major that would prepare me for the field and then began to look for opportunities outside the classroom to further my engagement and learning. I decided to reach out to Professor Luscombe after several months of involvement with the Clean Energy Institute as an intern and learning of Organic Photovoltaic technologies during my own exploration-her lab seemed like a perfect place to get exposure to rigorous scientific research as well as experience with an emerging technology.
How does this activity connect to your concurrent or past coursework? How does it speak to your broader education goals and experiences?
This research experience involves many tenets of being an engineer in the clean tech field, essential exposure that will allow meet focus in on and hone skills necessary to success. I will practice chemistry-we will synthesize a solution that we will use to coat the fiber. I will gain experience in a variety of different practices essential to the engineering field-along with the other new team member we will be seeking out training and certification in Scanning Electron Microscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy, and Optical Microscopy techniques. We are also scheduled to trained to use the UW Machine Shop as well as 3D printing. These techniques and concepts will help me strengthen my standing for future opportunities in engineering.
How will your activity contribute to the larger goals of the organization/your partners?
The mission statement of the Clean Energy Institute is: "[T]o accelerate the adoption of a scalable clean energy future that will improve the health and economy of our state, nation, and world." This statement speaks to my career and personal goals as a prospective engineer and a contributing member to global well being. By partaking in the opportunity to perform research, not only am I advancing my own knowledge but also pushing to produce potentially world-changing technologies, the goal of the CEI, and help phase out unsustainable energy practices. As evident in recent upwards trends in the global atmosphere and climate, we must make a change. Organic Photovoltaics fibers have an incredible potential to help accelerate this change.
This summer I will be participating in Organic Photovoltaic Fiber Instrumentation Research in the Christine Luscombe Lab in the UW Clean Energy Institute. Building on a process and mechanism designed by past students who have moved on, I will be working under a current Senior who is the project lead. We will be focusing on streamlining the fabrication of fiber strands made of organic materials that have the ability to harness the energy in sunlight and convert it to usable electricity (Organic Photovoltaic Fibers, or OPVF). Throughout the course of my involvement, I will gain exposure to various technologies and techniques necessary in the engineering field today.
Explain how your activity demonstrates the values of the Honors Program Experiential Learning area you selected. Rather than reiterating our definition, outline how your activity embodies this definition.
I will be demonstrating the values of the Research Honors Program Experiential Learning Area by participating in research applicable to a potential career path. I will be working with 2 other undergraduates, both who are in the Materials Science Department. I believe that this experience will offer an interesting cross section with my chosen field, Chemical Engineering, through focusing on the same topic: clean technology. I hope to gain useful insights into how material scientists and engineers approach problems, and gain information that I'm sure will be applicable to my chemical engineering coursework, and at the very least will offer another perspective. I see this as a valuable interdisciplinary opportunity to grow as an engineer.
How and why did you select this engagement? What skills or experiences do you hope to gain from it?
I sought out this opportunity because I believe it is a first step towards my future and career goals in clean energy technologies. After deciding to pursue the field this past year, I first decided on a major that would prepare me for the field and then began to look for opportunities outside the classroom to further my engagement and learning. I decided to reach out to Professor Luscombe after several months of involvement with the Clean Energy Institute as an intern and learning of Organic Photovoltaic technologies during my own exploration-her lab seemed like a perfect place to get exposure to rigorous scientific research as well as experience with an emerging technology.
How does this activity connect to your concurrent or past coursework? How does it speak to your broader education goals and experiences?
This research experience involves many tenets of being an engineer in the clean tech field, essential exposure that will allow meet focus in on and hone skills necessary to success. I will practice chemistry-we will synthesize a solution that we will use to coat the fiber. I will gain experience in a variety of different practices essential to the engineering field-along with the other new team member we will be seeking out training and certification in Scanning Electron Microscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy, and Optical Microscopy techniques. We are also scheduled to trained to use the UW Machine Shop as well as 3D printing. These techniques and concepts will help me strengthen my standing for future opportunities in engineering.
How will your activity contribute to the larger goals of the organization/your partners?
The mission statement of the Clean Energy Institute is: "[T]o accelerate the adoption of a scalable clean energy future that will improve the health and economy of our state, nation, and world." This statement speaks to my career and personal goals as a prospective engineer and a contributing member to global well being. By partaking in the opportunity to perform research, not only am I advancing my own knowledge but also pushing to produce potentially world-changing technologies, the goal of the CEI, and help phase out unsustainable energy practices. As evident in recent upwards trends in the global atmosphere and climate, we must make a change. Organic Photovoltaics fibers have an incredible potential to help accelerate this change.
Reflection
As the summer draws to a close, I can firmly say that I am glad I am pursuing a career in engineering. While I acknowledge that research in an academic setting is vastly different than R&D you would experience in industry, the skills I have gained over the past few months will be applicable to a wide variety of fields.
To more clearly define our project, an organic photovoltaic fiber (OPVF) is basically what you could call “Solar String”. When exposed to sunlight current is produced along the string, and you can produce electricity just like your traditional solar panels. A photovoltaic device in string form has a wide variety of applications, specifically integration in textiles. With a spool of OPVF manufacturers of tents, emergency shelters, outerwear, curtains, etc… could easily integrate the fibers into their production process to produce emergency shelters that could harness sunlight to provide heat, lighting, energy for communication devices—the possibilities are truly endless.
Building on the progress we made over the summer, I intend to keep my position within the Luscombe group alongside the team of two other undergraduates, as I feel at this point we are just picking up steam. Over the course of the summer we designed and implemented a new coating mechanism that we believe will be more efficient, and are in the process of optimizing the samples we have produced thus far in order to judge the efficacy of our new method. Looking towards the future, we have a great number of ideas that we hope to incorporate into our design, and hope that we will be able to reach our project goal within the next year—a spool of Organic Photovoltaic Fiber.
As I discovered, research is almost nothing like the classroom. Yes you learn new theories, study the physics of different characterization methods (for example how SEM uses a focused beam of electrons to find out a different information about a surface), but what you do with that information I found was very, very different. Often when I research a piece of information, if it’s for a class I store the information away, keep it until I needed to regurgitate it on a test or for a homework assignment, and regrettably never need to use that piece of information again. How I learned to treat information was completely different.
When approaching a problem that our team had—say: just how we wanted to ensure a uniform coating of a wire with a solution—the information that we needed was out there to be found. After compiling different studies and data points, we would convene to discuss just how the different methods of coating wires best fit our application—and then we would go and build the part we needed to implement that coating mechanism into our design. In several cases we found that the information we needed truly wasn’t out there! In which case we had to make our best inference and judgement, and take note to see how that decision/variable would effect our outcomes in future trials.
The difference here is that the information never entered a period of dormancy after we first encountered it. Instead of slowly dying away, we were able to manipulate the information and transform it into something we could hold in our hands. Thats why I believe the learning that occurred while in lab was so appealing to me, it never was truly presented to us on a screen for us to write down, it was out there for us to go and find—or discover ourselves.
Looking back over what we achieved this summer, I realized I had practiced a skill I had not thought was essential to this experience at the beginning—patience. Oftentimes we found ourselves waiting, whether it was for a new part to finish being 3D printed or waiting outside the mechanical engineering machine shop for it to open. I’ve never considered myself a patient person—when I start on something I want to finish it as soon as possible, and it’s easy for me to become fixated on one issue that I want to solve before I move on to anything else. Normally I consider this to be a beneficial trait, as it has helped me always meet deadlines and with time management during my time in school. These periods of waiting, where moving forward in one aspect of our project was impossible, taught me to be more efficient. We were able to categorize many different steps that we could take towards progress (what we called “Action Items”), so we had multiple action items to switch between in the face of waiting. In this vein I believe we were able to be extremely efficient, and I learnt that I was able to manage the fixation on one issue and process many at a time. Honing this ability will be essential to any engineering career I pursue.
Reading again my initial expectations at the outset of my summer research involvement, I think I did experience all the values of an Honors Experiential Learning activity. I gained exposure to a field I might not have otherwise been able to work in through my normal coursework—Materials Science & Engineering. A field that I now can see I could have easily ended up in, in the clean energy field the two fields (MSE and Chem E) go hand in hand. While materials science is necessary to develop and test different ways of producing energy with different materials, chemical engineering is necessary to scale those new technologies to allow people all over the world to use them. Both are at the center of the solutions to all our energy problems.
In all, I think that this learning experience was incredibly important to the way I process information that I learn in the classroom and approach problems. The random facts and tidbits that could easily be dismissed I now know could be incredibly valuable in future applications, and drawing parallels between what I learn in the chemical engineering coursework and the processes that occur within our organic photovoltaic wire will only help accelerate my learning and understanding of photovoltaic technologies. Problems do not always have one solution, and often defining the problem is truly the hardest part of solving it. I remain excited to see where my teammates and I can take this project, and where organic photovoltaic fiber begins to transition from theoretical to practical use around the world.
To more clearly define our project, an organic photovoltaic fiber (OPVF) is basically what you could call “Solar String”. When exposed to sunlight current is produced along the string, and you can produce electricity just like your traditional solar panels. A photovoltaic device in string form has a wide variety of applications, specifically integration in textiles. With a spool of OPVF manufacturers of tents, emergency shelters, outerwear, curtains, etc… could easily integrate the fibers into their production process to produce emergency shelters that could harness sunlight to provide heat, lighting, energy for communication devices—the possibilities are truly endless.
Building on the progress we made over the summer, I intend to keep my position within the Luscombe group alongside the team of two other undergraduates, as I feel at this point we are just picking up steam. Over the course of the summer we designed and implemented a new coating mechanism that we believe will be more efficient, and are in the process of optimizing the samples we have produced thus far in order to judge the efficacy of our new method. Looking towards the future, we have a great number of ideas that we hope to incorporate into our design, and hope that we will be able to reach our project goal within the next year—a spool of Organic Photovoltaic Fiber.
As I discovered, research is almost nothing like the classroom. Yes you learn new theories, study the physics of different characterization methods (for example how SEM uses a focused beam of electrons to find out a different information about a surface), but what you do with that information I found was very, very different. Often when I research a piece of information, if it’s for a class I store the information away, keep it until I needed to regurgitate it on a test or for a homework assignment, and regrettably never need to use that piece of information again. How I learned to treat information was completely different.
When approaching a problem that our team had—say: just how we wanted to ensure a uniform coating of a wire with a solution—the information that we needed was out there to be found. After compiling different studies and data points, we would convene to discuss just how the different methods of coating wires best fit our application—and then we would go and build the part we needed to implement that coating mechanism into our design. In several cases we found that the information we needed truly wasn’t out there! In which case we had to make our best inference and judgement, and take note to see how that decision/variable would effect our outcomes in future trials.
The difference here is that the information never entered a period of dormancy after we first encountered it. Instead of slowly dying away, we were able to manipulate the information and transform it into something we could hold in our hands. Thats why I believe the learning that occurred while in lab was so appealing to me, it never was truly presented to us on a screen for us to write down, it was out there for us to go and find—or discover ourselves.
Looking back over what we achieved this summer, I realized I had practiced a skill I had not thought was essential to this experience at the beginning—patience. Oftentimes we found ourselves waiting, whether it was for a new part to finish being 3D printed or waiting outside the mechanical engineering machine shop for it to open. I’ve never considered myself a patient person—when I start on something I want to finish it as soon as possible, and it’s easy for me to become fixated on one issue that I want to solve before I move on to anything else. Normally I consider this to be a beneficial trait, as it has helped me always meet deadlines and with time management during my time in school. These periods of waiting, where moving forward in one aspect of our project was impossible, taught me to be more efficient. We were able to categorize many different steps that we could take towards progress (what we called “Action Items”), so we had multiple action items to switch between in the face of waiting. In this vein I believe we were able to be extremely efficient, and I learnt that I was able to manage the fixation on one issue and process many at a time. Honing this ability will be essential to any engineering career I pursue.
Reading again my initial expectations at the outset of my summer research involvement, I think I did experience all the values of an Honors Experiential Learning activity. I gained exposure to a field I might not have otherwise been able to work in through my normal coursework—Materials Science & Engineering. A field that I now can see I could have easily ended up in, in the clean energy field the two fields (MSE and Chem E) go hand in hand. While materials science is necessary to develop and test different ways of producing energy with different materials, chemical engineering is necessary to scale those new technologies to allow people all over the world to use them. Both are at the center of the solutions to all our energy problems.
In all, I think that this learning experience was incredibly important to the way I process information that I learn in the classroom and approach problems. The random facts and tidbits that could easily be dismissed I now know could be incredibly valuable in future applications, and drawing parallels between what I learn in the chemical engineering coursework and the processes that occur within our organic photovoltaic wire will only help accelerate my learning and understanding of photovoltaic technologies. Problems do not always have one solution, and often defining the problem is truly the hardest part of solving it. I remain excited to see where my teammates and I can take this project, and where organic photovoltaic fiber begins to transition from theoretical to practical use around the world.