Shane Davies

I am a third year PhD student in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Metamaterials (XM²). I graduated from the University of Exeter in 2017 with an MPhys in Physics.

I am currently working with Dr Steven Hepplestone, Prof. G.P. Srivastava and Dr David Horsell on improving the efficiency of thermoelectric devices. This work is in collaboration with our industrial partners at Deregallera Ltd.

Thermoelectric devices harvest the waste heat of everyday processes to create useful electricity, and represent a enticing way to reduce the environmental impact of our planets growing energy needs. Our work hopes to exploit nanoscale patterning of material interfaces, to optimise the thermal transport properties for thermoelectric applications.

This work utilises first principles calculations to discern the electronic and phononic properties of materials and investigate how changes to the structure at interface regions can modify these properties. Building upon this we use semi-empirical force field methods to simulate larger, and more physical systems.

Conferences
Oral Presentations:

MRS Spring Meeting 2019, Phoenix AZ, USA (22nd-26th April 2019) - "Interfacial Patterning as a Framework for Creating High ZT Thermoelectric Materials"

E-MRS Fall Meeting 2018, Warsaw, Poland (17th-20th September 2018) - "Increasing Thermoelectric ZT Using Interfacial Patterning"

Poster Presentations:

Materials for Clean Energy Conference (MCEC) 2019, National Physical Laboratory, UK (8th-10th April 2019) - "Nano-scale Patterning for Improved Thermoelectrics"

Showcasing Emerging Technologies - Metamaterials, Birmingham, UK (19th March 2019) - "Nano-scale Patterning for Thermoelectric Applications"

MSSC 2018: Ab Initio Modelling in Solid State Chemistry, Turin, Italy (2nd-7th September 2018) - "Nano-scale Patterning for Thermoelectric Applications"