Research Project - Nanowires

Post date: Apr 17, 2010 6:10:37 PM

For this research project, I had taken on one of the most important role of a project manager. I was responsible for project planning including time management. During the first week of the project initialisation, I drew a Gantt chart planning all or most of the major tasks at hand. This is shown as black baseline bars on the Gantt chart in this supplementary file. I used a professional package (Microsoft Project) to plan the project to allow maximum accuracy and resource allocations based on the typical working patterns of students. Other management tasks included assigning deliverables to team members appropriately and accurately.

I believe communication within the team is very important so I made sure everyone was communicating regularly on their progress and notifying me or Dr Durrani of any questions that were raised. The primary form of communication was group meetings and emails. However, since all of team are good friends it meant that informal meetings would also raise some points regarding certain aspects of the project.

My second main responsibility was to research and write a whole section on a unique application of SiNWs. I chose to research use of SiNWs in anodes for lithium batteries. A practice of researching and reading technical papers provided by Dr. Durrani, aided in better understanding complex papers. Research was carried out using online services such as ISI Web of Knowledge, MetaLib, online catalogues of IEEE Xplore, American Chemical Society and Nature archives. It should be noted that my research in this field included manufacture of SiNWs using CVD-VLS which is included in a separate section in the main report. This research and write-up of individual sections was originally scheduled to be completed during the Christmas break, however this was delayed and thus the rest of the tasks were aligned accordingly.

My other responsibilities included helping with main report compilation and compiling and editing this supplementary file. I provided input on the formatting of the report and the website. I was also responsible for communications with Dr Durrani. I have chosen to present this project along with a few others. This responsibility includes creating the presentation and will also include the time management and task assignment.

I wholly contributed a section titled “Lithium batteries with silicon nanowire anodes”, which I believe has made a significant contribution to the research report. Through my role as a project manager, I ensured the smooth running of the team including keeping everyone on track for the final deadline.

The project report PDFs can be found here:

[view online]

[Supplementary File]