Materials Day 2009 at MIT

Today I skipped a music class and XC practice to go to a day long Materials Day symposium at MIT. It consisted of the following presentations:

1: "New materials for PV modules: Cost, Performance and Reliability" - Let my preface my reaction to this talk by saying that I believe that I do not have a future in photovoltaics. I find it not very interesting, and not related to materials science in ways I find interesting. Thus, I didn't find this talk very exciting, and, being the first of the day, it may have been all I could do to stay awake.

2: "Nanostructured Heat Transfer and Energy Conversion Materials" -This presentation was probably my favorite. I was wide awake for all of this. It described a certain system consisting of a p-type semiconductor and an n-type semiconductor, each attached to two different plates. Then, if you create a temperature gradient between the plates, it creates an electrical current. Conversely, if you put a current through the semiconductors, you can create a temperature gradient! So this talk was all about this technology and the search for a material with high electrical conductivity and low thermal conductivity, and various methods for achieving and optimizing this.

3: "Progress and Challegnes in Solid-State Lighting" - All about LEDs. Not very interesting. A lot more semiconductor and electricity stuff.

4: "What's Exciting about Excitonics?" - This one seemed pretty cool, although I understand any of it really. It was about these things called excitons, which I guess are energy carriers of some sort? 

5: "Nano-structured Materials for Next Generation Fuel Cells" - This one wasn't terribly interesting, but I liked the speaker. However, he mostly just talked about how his group tried this and they got some unexpected results and it was cool and all but not useful so they tried this instead but then they got these unexpected results which were also cool but not useful. 

6: "The "Materials Genome" Project at MIT: Accelerated and Large-Scale Materials Discovery in the Energy Field" - This talk was fantastic. This guy is heading a group at MIT that is trying to computationally characterize and predict the properties for as many materials as they can (generally single-crystal crystalline materials of various compositions). The things they can do and have found are amazing. I think that this sort of sorting and computational prediction of the structure and properties of materials will become a lot bigger in the future, especially when computational power increases. 

7: "A123systems Li-ion batteries: from Nanotech to Reality" - This talk was pretty good, all about how this MIT spin-off company, A123 Systems, grew and became successful. They make lithium ion batteries. I find I liked the part of the presentation about the company and the entrepreneurship better than the information about batteries, as again, it's a lot of electronics related materials science.

8: "Creating and Funding Startups: A Venture Capital Perspective" - This talk was given by a venture capitalist all about what venture capitalism is, how it works, what they look for, etc. Very interesting.

After the talks was a poster session and a dinner, both of which I did not attend as I needed to get home and get a lot of work done. The talks that were interesting, I really enjoyed, and I'm very glad I went.