Greg Nielson
Greg Nielson
October / November 2011
Volume 9 Number 5
Greg Nielson could have been annoyed by a caller who telephoned him by mistake, thinking he was a different former Truman Fellow, but instead the Sandia researcher engaged the man in conversation and collaboration was born. “It was a wrong number,” Nielson said, “but I heard he was from the solar group and he was looking for another Truman Fellow, so I gave him the name and then said, ‘Actually, I have this idea. It could be useful for solar power.’”
Six years later, Nielson and the caller, Vipin Gupta of Sandia and more than two dozen other researchers developed tiny glitter-sized solar cells called microsystems-enabled photovoltaics (MEPVs) that could revolutionize the way solar energy is collected and used. In August, the Sandia team’s work won a regional Federal Laboratory Consortium Excellence in Technology Transfer award. Nielson, one of two researchers who in 2004 became the first Sandia Truman Fellows, also was honored with an Up-and-Coming Innovator award in 2010 for displaying enormous potential for innovation, entrepreneurial talent and the ability to develop unique solutions to complex scientific challenges.
Gil Herrera, director of Sandia’s microsystems science, technology and components center, said he nominated Nielson as an Up-and-Coming Innovator because of his intellectual leadership and his ability to work well with people, to manage a project and to keep a team of about 30 people together.
“The complexity of modern-day inventions requires somebody who can broadly understand the concept and the components of the invention, as modern inventions tend to be made from integrated systems,” Herrera said. “Greg is an outstanding example of how you do innovation into the future, as he combines this systems-level vision with excellent leadership and teamwork.”
The MEPVs are fabricated using microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques. They are expected to be less expensive and more efficient than current photovoltaic collectors. Sandia has been working with a number of companies, other laboratories and universities on MEPVs. Nielson said he came up with the idea for MEPVs while talking with a friend, Mike Watts, a former Sandia employee who is now a professor at MIT. At the time, research had been done on how MEMS devices interacted with coherent light—for example, lasers—but the two researchers discussed looking into how MEMS devices interacted with incoherent light, like sunlight.
“When I started my Ph.D., I was realizing that working at the boundaries of MEMS, microsystems and optics, there’s a lot of unexplored things there,” Nielson said. “It’s really exciting because you are bringing these technologies together that are fairly new, so you can do things that just weren’t possible to do before. It’s fun. There’s a lot of creativity there.”
Because the solar cells are so small—they can be as small as two microns thick—they are flexible, which has enormous advantages for manufacturing and efficiency. A human hair is, on average, 70 microns in diameter.
Talking in his office, Nielson pulled a container off the top of his desk that contained what looked like a bubble of oil with glitter inside it floating in water. He explained researchers also are looking at self-assembled monolayers using different chemicals, so they can coat either the metal or the other face of the solar cell to orient the glitter in a certain direction.
“So basically you can get them sunnyside up,” Nielson said. “The reason this is cool is that we’re working to create a system where you use these very small solar cells as a sort of photovoltaic ink. We want to print them onto a flexible substrate or wherever we want, thousands at a time, like a Xerox copying process. We’ve made some progress down that path. We’ve done some things there that people have not done before.”
Nielson emphasized that nearly 30 Sandia employees have worked on MEPVs, a team effort that has helped move the innovation along.“Sandia is definitely a place where people are inclined to work together and that really does help,” Nielson said. “You can come up with really great solutions in your own little area and that’s fantastic, but if you can bring together people from a variety of areas to come up with a solution, then that’s even more powerful.” Nielson first encountered Sandia as an undergraduate intern working with Sandia’s Cubit Group, which works with an enabling technology for high-performance computer modeling and simulations. Rob Leland, now director of computing research at Sandia, was Nielson’s manager at the time and helped him consider different options for graduate school. After getting his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Utah State University, Nielson went to MIT, where he received a master’s in mechanical engineering and a doctorate in mechanical engineering with a focus on optical microsystems.
When he was a Truman Fellow, Nielson worked on improving the energy efficiency and performance of optical MEMS switching, which would make the switches more appealing for applications in, for example, computing or telecommunications. Nielson said he came up with some ideas that led to faster switching using less power. The result was a switch that operates at 225 nanoseconds, needs 22 volts and was about 10 times faster than the fastest switch on the market at the time.After the Truman Fellowship, Greg became a member of Sandia’s technical staff.
Nielson said he enjoys creating new things and solving problems. “Being able to spin Sandia’s technology out to companies, so that those things can be commercialized and benefit society, that’s great,” Nielson said. “If at the end of my career, I had come up with some things that people find useful, I’d feel like I’d done good things.”
Heather Clark is a writer at Sandia National Laboratories.
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