AEP 5500

Applied Solid State: Physics of Renewable Energy

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2021-2022.

Can an electric vehicle be made cheaper than a gasoline one with comparable range? How much of our energy needs can be supplied by solar energy? What is the maximum efficiency of a solar cell? Graduate-level analysis of renewable energy devices and materials that you will likely encounter in research or advanced industrial settings, with a goal of understanding their ultimate limits, current efficiencies and opportunities for improvement. The main emphasis is on electrical energy creation, conversion and storage devices – Solar Cells, Fuel Cells, Batteries, Supercapacitors and Thermoelectrics, which are areas of current research at Cornell.

When Offered Spring.

Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisite: a knowledge of Fermi-Dirac distributions and chemical potentials e.g. from a class in either solid state physics, physical chemistry or statistical mechanics.

Course Attribute (CU-SBY)

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