Interests
Low-cost solar energy, perovskites, catalysts, clean and accessible hydrogen.
Research
Dr Sharma’s research interest focuses on developing low-cost perovskite-silicon tandem and earth-abundant catalysts based systems for solar water splitting, as an efficient, clean and cheaper route to hydrogen production. Her research consists of several elements:
- Developing earth abundant catalysts based on physical deposition methods for efficient integration with silicon photoelectrodes and current industrial manufacturing process.
- Designing low-cost perovskite-silicon tandem and earth-abundant catalysts based systems for high efficiency direct solar hydrogen generation.
- Computational modelling of photovoltaic based solar hydrogen generation systems to understand the system configurations and limitations.
- Computational modelling of catalysts at semiconductor interfaces and their interactions with light and electrolytes. This involves getting an atom-level understanding of the electronic processes at interfaces.
- Techno-economic analysis of PV based direct solar hydrogen generation systems for large scale hydrogen generation applications.
Biography
Dr Sharma is a research fellow in the solar PV group, School of Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science. She recently finished her PhD within the same group. She is a physicist and is extremely passionate about applying physics to energy applications. She is currently supervised by Dr Fiona Beck, Professor Kylie Catchpole, and Dr Siva Karuturi. Dr Sharma received her MSc degree in Physics from Savitribai Phule Pune University in 2016.
Activities & Awards
Dr Sharma was awarded an INSPIRE scholarship by Department of Science and Technology, Government of India during her Bachelors and Masters (2011-2016). For more details on her activities, please see her research output.