Post date: Jul 28, 2018 5:58:20 PM
Unfortunately this time I missed a post. Last month I was traveling around Europe thus I decided to jump the news of June and resume it in July.
As mentioned, in June I was in Europe for two different meetings. The first was a Marie Curie monitoring meeting in Berlin, and the second was the International Conference on Thermoelectrics (ICT) in Caen (France). I really enjoyed both of them not only because I was in touch with old friends and colleagues but also because I met new people and I set new collaborations.
During the first meeting it was really nice meet postdocs who are in the same situation that I am, thus it was great to exchange experiences and issues related to the projects.
Among all the interesting projects, a couple o them were really related to mine work. Talking to the fellow working on these projects and to the expert chosen by the European Commission was extremely useful. I also acquired the contact of a company which sell solar cells which I am going to use for my project. That's great!
Finally I also had the occasion to talk with a project officer who was very nice and helpful to me.
After the Berlin meeting and a weekend break to my hometown (YES!), I traveled to Caen in northern France for the ICT. Even if during this conference I did not see any breakthrough talk (many of them were interesting although) I met a lot of old friends and colleagues. Talking with them was very useful and nice. Some suggestions made me think more carefully to some important steps I am going o take in the near future. I also met new people with whom I already talking to set some collaborations.
Thus in general this conference was very useful and also the city and the food, I have to say, were very good.
Back to MIT during the past 2-3 weeks I have been busy especially with paper revision and submission. My theoretical paper were finally published on JAP (https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5022569) and another already upload to arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04245) was accepted in a peer reviewed journal. In the mean time I had to work on two other papers that we are going to submit soon.
There was some time also for doing characterization on new samples (I will talk about this in a new post) and for some shopping.
Actually I bought several new amorphous silicon solar cells from a Chinese company (as mentioned the company contact was suggested by a fellow met during the Berlin meeting). These solar cells have exactly the characteristics that I need to show the hybridization with thermoelectrics. This was very fortunate. I looking forward to measure them.
Now I also working on buying the thermoelectric material for the optimized TEG that I am going to build. I have already found a company that sell what I need. I really hope to be able to finalize that.
I will write about this in the next post.