Profile

I am doing a PhD in “functional nanomaterials”. This means I am at university as a student learning about and doing experiments on “functional nanomaterials”. Functional nanomaterials is an area of science that is interested in things that a very small, much too small to see with the naked eye, and usually too small to even see with an ordinary microscope. I “grow” zinc oxide nanorods onto glass; this is a bit like how you can grow colourful crystals in saltwater. The nanorods grow as vertical pillars, if you could shrink yourself down to walk between them it would be like walking through a forest of hexagonal trees. I shine light on the nanorods and depending on which colour light I illuminate them with I can get different amounts of electricity out. One day my work will hopefully lead to cheap solar cells, much thinner than the big black ones you often see on people’s roofs so that they could easily go on peoples cars or if they were to be made slightly transparent they could be used as windows that also generate electricity.

Growing my nanorods requires putting on a lab coat, safety glasses and some purple rubber gloves. Firstly I have to cut the glass that I will be growing onto, I use a sharp tool that looks a bit like a pen, then scratch it across the glass using a ruler before carefully snapping it to get a piece of the right size. The small pieces of glass then go into a beaker of water and a placed into an “ultrasonicator”, this is a bath of water which is vibrated really quickly, the only way you can tell it is working is the ripples in the water; the rippling water cleans the glass. Whilst the glass is being cleaned I can weigh out the chemicals that will eventually grow into my nanorods. Once the chemcials are weighed out, I dissolve them in very clean water and pour it into another beaker. I place the clean glass into the beaker full of chemicals and put it into a hot bath which causes my nanorods to grow. On other days I will take the nanorods I have grown and I will place them into a different beaker of chemicals and shine light on them with LEDs; the nanorods absorb the light and generate electricity, they use this electricity to make a chemical reaction happen. How fast the chemical reactions happen can be measured with an ammeter and a computer; I then have to use this data to see how much of the light was absorbed and how well the nanorods cause chemical reactions to occur.