Congratulations to our two incredible research teams involved in ‘The New Inventors’ grand final.
Although the University projects missed out on the major prize, making it through to the final five inventions of the series was an enormous achievement.
Professor Paul Dastoor, from the University’s Priority Research Centre for Organic Electronics, reached the grand final with his organic solar-cell paint.
Professor Dastoor and his team are now working on ways to improve this material, with the aim of printing efficient large area solar cells. They recently gained $1 million from the Australian National Fabrication Facility to establish a new large scale organic electronics printing facility, at the Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources (NIER).
With support from Newcastle Innovation, the commercial arm of the University, key commercial partners have been identified for the Plastic Solar-Cell. The project was recently presented to potential investors at a trade expo in China.
Professor Behdad Moghtaderi and Dr Elham Doroodchi, from the Priority Research Centre for Energy, secured a place in the finals with the revolutionary new technology GRANEX – a heat engine for power generation from low-grade heat sources including geothermal and industrial waste heat.
Granite Power commercialised and secured the licence of the patentable technology and the research has generated international interest.
Professor Moghtaderi and Dr Doroodchi are negotiating with two companies in Germany and China who are interested in manufacturing and marketing GRANEX technology in Europe and Asia, respectively. They are also negotiating with a number of Australian and international mining and power generation companies to retrofit their existing facilities, plants and other infrastructures with GRANEX units.
Newcastle Innovation has provided commercialisation support to both the Plastic Solar Cell and GRANEX technologies.
“When industry has a problem, Newcastle Innovation helps to solve it by putting them in touch with the University’s researchers and their innovations,” Brent Jenkins, CEO Newcastle Innovation said.
