CEM - Center for Energy Materials

There is an urgent need to develop new environmentally friendly energy sources and improving energy efficiency in many technologies and processes. Denmark and most other countries do not have a single renewable energy source available to replace fossil fuel, and thus the future energy supply must integrate several contributions. The Centre for Energy Materials (CEM) will target five very promising areas within energy science: (i) Thermoelectric materials, (ii) Gas storage materials, iii) Photocatalytic hydrogen production and water remediation, iv) Nanoparticles for energy applications, and (v) Biofuel production. A breakthrough in just one of these areas will have a monumental impact on modern society. Just imagine if reliable low temperature cooling was available for superconductors in power transmission, if waste heat from industrial processes could be efficiently harvested as electricity, if organic waste could be cheaply converted to diesel fuel, or if solar energy converted to hydrogen could be easily stored in mobile applications. CEM will unite and vastly expand the strong, but separate, projects currently conducted by iNANO, University of Aarhus, and the Institute for Energy Technology (IET), Aalborg University, in energy materials research, and couple these efforts with outstanding expertise from complementary international research groups and Danish industrial companies. CEM will complement the existing strong Danish activities e.g. in fuel cells, wind mills and bioethanol by focusing on other important energy technologies. The CEM mission is to conduct outstanding interdisciplinary research and to exploit the results in specific industrial applications. The Center will have a critical mass with education of >22 post docs and PhD students, and this will make CEM a power house in energy science. CEM will have a comprehensive scientific approach encompassing synthesis, multi-technique characterization and modeling with all activities directly tied to commercialization via strong participation by Danish industry.