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Advanced Materials group
IRL’s Advanced Materials group brings together a wide range of research expertise. Its focus is on the the design, preparation and application of advanced materials for the development of novel products for the industrial, energy and infrastructure sectors. Our work spans the fields of advanced ceramics and cementing systems, green energy solutions that include carbon capture technologies and emerging technologies such as photonics. All of these endeavours are supported by our world leading mathematical modeling and data analysis capabilities.
Materials and Energy team
Our 20-strong research team combines New Zealand and internationally trained scientists and engineers supported by a cluster of enthusiastic students from New Zealand and offshore. Our wide base of experience, expertise and excellence in materials research enables the team to address science and technology challenges right through from strategic research, to applied science and the transfer of technology to our industry partners. The team uses and develops advanced materials and processes to create new intellectual property aligned to the needs of our industry partners, or in some cases to seed the development of new industry. We achieve this by innovating new materials and processes, and by measuring and refining their structures, properties and performance. Our primary research emphasis is the application of advanced materials science and engineering to solve industry challenges across the energy sector.
Our current research programmes are:
- Hydrogen as a renewable source of energy
- CO2 capture technologies
- Solar photovoltaics
- Inorganic cementing systems
- High performance ceramics
- Nanoceramics and nanowires for new energy technologies.
Photonics team
The photonics team at IRL is mainly focused on the design, synthesis and characterisation of novel photonic materials. We have expertise in both organic and inorganic synthetic techniques as well as in the characterisation of these materials to assess their suitability as the active components in devices for emerging photonics technologies. We are also involved in the development of new scintillator materials for radiation dosimetry[?] and detection.
Our main areas of interest and capability are:
- Synthesis of high performance polymers e.g. polyamides, polyketenes, polyacrylates, for use in nonlinear optics, THz[?] lenses, scintillation detectors and index matching materials
- Glass ceramics and photorefractive materials
- Evaluation of the response and effacy of photonic materials
- Evaluation of material stabilities, including photostability and thermal stability
- Quantum dots and nanoparticles for index matching and as the active materials in novel Bragg gratings
- Theoretical and structural aspects of organic photonic materials, including X-ray crystallographic studies.
Our team currently has 12 members and is comprised of synthetic chemists and experimental physicists. We also have strong research collaborations with a number of domestic and international organisations.
Applied Maths team
The Applied Maths team has world leading capability and a long history in numerical modelling and data analysis. Our specific expertise is in modelling the transport of heat and mass; modelling the properties and performance of advanced materials; and statistical data analysis. The key strength of the team is the ability to develop and apply advanced modelling techniques to problems that cannot be addressed with off-the-shelf techniques.
Our currents areas of work include:
- Computational materials design and characterisation using state-of-the-art high performance computing clusters
- Developing models of geothermal systems to assist consenting and management of the systems.
- Reactive transport modelling which has been applied to assessing CO2 sequestration and analysing geochemistry in geothermal systems
- Design, implementation and analysis of synchrotron experiments
- Statistical design and analysis
- Assessment of uncertainty in measured data.