 The Clean Energy Project Screensaver | |
| Operating system | cross-platform |
|---|---|
| Platform | BOINC |
The Clean Energy Project (CEP) was a virtual high-throughput discovery and design effort for the next generation of plastic solar cell materials that has finished. It studies millions of candidate structures to identify suitable compounds for the harvesting of renewable energy from the sun and for other organic electronic applications. It ran on the BOINC platform.
The project searched for the most suitable organic compounds with which to make solar cells, the best polymeric membranes with which to make fuel cells, and how best to assemble the molecules for such devices.
On June 24, 2013, the Clean Energy Project released its database to the public and the research community. The release was featured on the White House Blog [1] and by several news organizations including the MIT Technology Review. [2] The database contains 150 million density functional theory calculations on 2.3 million molecules.
Cheminformatics refers to use of physical chemistry theory with computer and information science techniques—so called "in silico" techniques—in application to a range of descriptive and prescriptive problems in the field of chemistry, including in its applications to biology and related molecular fields. Such in silico techniques are used, for example, by pharmaceutical companies and in academic settings to aid and inform the process of drug discovery, for instance in the design of well-defined combinatorial libraries of synthetic compounds, or to assist in structure-based drug design. The methods can also be used in chemical and allied industries, and such fields as environmental science and pharmacology, where chemical processes are involved or studied.
Photovoltaics (PV) is the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect, a phenomenon studied in physics, photochemistry, and electrochemistry. The photovoltaic effect is commercially used for electricity generation and as photosensors.
World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and adding support for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) in 2005, World Community Grid eventually discontinued the Grid MP client and consolidated on the BOINC platform in 2008. In September 2021, it was announced that IBM transferred ownership to the Krembil Research Institute of University Health Network in Toronto, Ontario.
Water splitting is the chemical reaction in which water is broken down into oxygen and hydrogen:
A solar cell, or photovoltaic cell, is an electronic device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect, which is a physical and chemical phenomenon. It is a form of photoelectric cell, defined as a device whose electrical characteristics, such as current, voltage, or resistance, vary when exposed to light. Individual solar cell devices are often the electrical building blocks of photovoltaic modules, known colloquially as solar panels. The common single junction silicon solar cell can produce a maximum open-circuit voltage of approximately 0.5 volts to 0.6volts.
Hybrid solar cells combine advantages of both organic and inorganic semiconductors. Hybrid photovoltaics have organic materials that consist of conjugated polymers that absorb light as the donor and transport holes. Inorganic materials in hybrid cells are used as the acceptor and electron transporter in the structure. The hybrid photovoltaic devices have a potential for not only low-cost by roll-to-roll processing but also for scalable solar power conversion.
A solar cell panel, solar electric panel, photo-voltaic (PV) module, PV panel or solar panel is an assembly of photovoltaic solar cells mounted in a frame, and a neatly organised collection of PV panels is called a photovoltaic system or solar array. Solar panels capture sunlight as a source of radiant energy, which is converted into electric energy in the form of direct current (DC) electricity. Arrays of a photovoltaic system can be used to generate solar electricity that supplies electrical equipment directly, or feeds power back into an alternate current (AC) grid via an inverter system.
Building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) are photovoltaic materials that are used to replace conventional building materials in parts of the building envelope such as the roof, skylights, or facades. They are increasingly being incorporated into the construction of new buildings as a principal or ancillary source of electrical power, although existing buildings may be retrofitted with similar technology. The advantage of integrated photovoltaics over more common non-integrated systems is that the initial cost can be offset by reducing the amount spent on building materials and labor that would normally be used to construct the part of the building that the BIPV modules replace. In addition, BIPV allows for more widespread solar adoption when the building's aesthetics matter and traditional rack-mounted solar panels would disrupt the intended look of the building.
An organic solar cell (OSC) or plastic solar cell is a type of photovoltaic that uses organic electronics, a branch of electronics that deals with conductive organic polymers or small organic molecules, for light absorption and charge transport to produce electricity from sunlight by the photovoltaic effect. Most organic photovoltaic cells are polymer solar cells.
Molecular modeling on GPU is the technique of using a graphics processing unit (GPU) for molecular simulations.
Nanocrystal solar cells are solar cells based on a substrate with a coating of nanocrystals. The nanocrystals are typically based on silicon, CdTe or CIGS and the substrates are generally silicon or various organic conductors. Quantum dot solar cells are a variant of this approach, but take advantage of quantum mechanical effects to extract further performance. Dye-sensitized solar cells are another related approach, but in this case the nano-structuring is part of the substrate.
The Centre for Advanced 2D Materials (CA2DM), at the National University of Singapore (NUS), is the first centre in Asia dedicated to graphene research. The Centre was established under the scientific advice of two Nobel Laureates in physics – Prof Andre Geim and Prof Konstantin Novoselov - who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of graphene. It was created for the conception, characterization, theoretical modeling, and development of transformative technologies based on two-dimensional crystals, such as graphene. In 2019, Prof Konstantin Novoselov moved to Singapore and joined NUS as Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.
Jenny Nelson is Professor of Physics in the Blackett Laboratory and Head of the Climate change mitigation team at the Grantham Institute - Climate Change and Environment at Imperial College London.
Massively Parallel Monte Carlo (MPMC) is a Monte Carlo method package primarily designed to simulate liquids, molecular interfaces, and functionalized nanoscale materials. It was developed originally by Jon Belof and is now maintained by a group of researchers in the Department of Chemistry and SMMARTT Materials Research Center at the University of South Florida. MPMC has been applied to the scientific research challenges of nanomaterials for clean energy, carbon sequestration, and molecular detection. Developed to run efficiently on the most powerful supercomputing platforms, MPMC can scale to extremely large numbers of CPUs or GPUs. Since 2012, MPMC has been released as an open-source software project under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3, and the repository is hosted on GitHub.
Annabella Selloni is the David B. Jones Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University.
Insilico Medicine is a biotechnology company based in Pak Shek Kok, Hong Kong in Hong Kong Science Park near the Chinese University of Hong Kong and in New York, at The Cure by Deerfield. The company combines genomics, big data analysis, and deep learning for in silico drug discovery.
Michael John Aziz is an American research scientist and engineer and the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, for which he served from 2009 to 2018 as the faculty coordinator for the Graduate Consortium for Energy and Environment. He is also Chief Scientist and a member of the board for Quino Energy, Inc.
Light harvesting materials harvest solar energy that can then be converted into chemical energy through photochemical processes. Synthetic light harvesting materials are inspired by photosynthetic biological systems such as light harvesting complexes and pigments that are present in plants and some photosynthetic bacteria. The dynamic and efficient antenna complexes that are present in photosynthetic organisms has inspired the design of synthetic light harvesting materials that mimic light harvesting machinery in biological systems. Examples of synthetic light harvesting materials are dendrimers, porphyrin arrays and assemblies, organic gels, biosynthetic and synthetic peptides, organic-inorganic hybrid materials, and semiconductor materials. Synthetic and biosynthetic light harvesting materials have applications in photovoltaics, photocatalysis, and photopolymerization.
Seth B. Darling is the Chief Science & Technology Officer of the Advanced Energy Technologies Directorate at Argonne National Laboratory. He previously served as director of the Center for Molecular Engineering, a research and development organization partnered with the University of Chicago focusing on advanced materials for cleaning water, quantum information science, and polymer science. Darling is also a senior scientist at both the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. He also directs the Advanced Materials for Energy-Water Systems (AMEWS) Center, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center formed in 2018.
In quantum computing, the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a quantum algorithm for quantum chemistry, quantum simulations and optimization problems. It is a hybrid algorithm that uses both classical computers and quantum computers to find the ground state of a given physical system. Given a guess or ansatz, the quantum processor calculates the expectation value of the system with respect to an observable, often the Hamiltonian, and a classical optimizer is used to improve the guess. The algorithm is based on variational method of quantum mechanics.