Valparaiso U prof. gets solar grant

VALPARAISO, Ind., May 29 (UPI) -- Indiana researchers Robert Palumbo and Frederick F. Jenny Jr. have embarked on a five-year mission to find a way to store solar energy in chemical form.

Valparaiso University researchers Palumbo, professor and chairman of mechanical engineering, and Jenny, professor of emerging technology, received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. They have used the grant to start the Solar Thermal Electrolysis Project, investigating how best to run cars on fuel from the sun, rather than depend on oil from the Middle East, the Post Tribune reported.

Palumbo is one of the world's leading solar energy researchers. The VU alumnus, who served for seven years as head of the High Temperature Solar Technology Laboratory at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, was recently appointed associate editor of the Journal of Solar Energy Engineering.

"The whole thrust behind the research we're doing is to try to find a way for us to store sunlight in a chemical form -- a fuel, you might say," Palumbo said. "If we can convert sunlight to the energy forms we need with a 20 percent conversion efficiency, a land area the size of Wisconsin would be enough to power the entire world."

VU is partnering with the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at University of Minnesota and with Deutsches Zentrum Fur Luft-und Raumfahrt, in Germany, where he and his students hope to test cells and a solar reactor they plan to build at VU.

The process concentrates sunlight thousands of times to heat a solar reactor that converts zinc oxide into metallic zinc, which could be used in fuel cells or the production of hydrogen fuel, Palumbo said. The fuel could power a bus running in Chicago at night in the rain on zinc produced in Arizona.