Researchers have found a way to get electrons to travel much farther than was previously thought possible in materials for organic solar cells. This advance could make these solar cells much more useful than inorganic alternatives.
“For years, people had treated the poor conductivity of organics as an unavoidable fact, and this shows that that’s not always the case,” says research leader Stephen Forrest, professor of engineering at University of Michigan.
Peter Mascher
is a professor in the Department of Engineering Physics and holds the William Sinclair Chair in Optoelectronics at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. There, he leads a research group specializing in the fabrication and characterization of nanostructures. Mascher was recently named technical editor of the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS) in the area of dielectric science and materials.
The Electrochemical Society: What made you want to take on an ECS editorial role?
Peter Mascher: I’ve been a member of the ECS Dielectric Science and Technology Division for many years and we’ve had many discussion on how to raise the quality of submissions to JSS and by extension, the quality of the journal overall. At some point in time, when the opportunity arises, one should try to make a contribution rather than just discussing it. I think there are avenues toward increasing the profile of the journal and I hope I can make a contribution there.
ECS: What do you hope to accomplish in your new role as JSS technical editor?
PM: I would like my colleagues who contribute to the ECS meetings in the various symposia to be much more aware of the journal and the opportunity to publish in JSS, which will help increase the overall quality. There should be a strong connection between the excellent presentations that are given at the various symposia at ECS meetings and the manuscripts that are being submitted to the journal.
The winner of the inaugural ECS India Section S.K. Rangarajan Graduate Student Award is Anantharaj S of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR).
The S.K. Rangarajan Graduate Student Award was established last year to assist a deserving student in India in pursuing a career in disciplines related to electrochemistry and solid state science and technology. The award consists of a certificate, a $500 (US) prize, and a complimentary one-year ECS membership. Moving forward, the ECS India Section will recognize one such winner annually at its acclaimed India School, which is a weeklong teaching program in electrochemistry for young researchers. The recipient may be invited to speak at that meeting about his or her work or on another topic of interest to the field of electrochemistry.
At each of our biannual meetings, ECS works with our education committee to provide professional development programming to help our students and young professionals develop skills for their current and future careers. ECS provides new topics at each meeting and helps attendees build their professional network.
ECS invites your organization to get involved and support these initiatives through a sponsorship. Below are the sponsorship options for our 233rd meeting in Seattle, WA. ECS is looking forward to the largest spring meeting to date and we want to help your company make connections while promoting your organization to your target audience.
To date, the ECS Digital Library contains over 40 completed focus issues across the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology.
All of these issues, devised to highlight rapidly accelerating areas of scientific and technological interest, continue to attract significant attention from ECS’s readership.
During 2017, the average ECS focus issue received 12,495 full text downloads.
One particular focus issue of 2017, however, proved no average issue, acquiring nearly 9.5 times that amount.
The JES Focus Issue of Selected Papers from IMLB 2016 with Invited Papers Celebrating 25 Years of Lithium Ion Batteries amassed a whopping 119,465 full text downloads over the course of 2017, securing its place not only as the most read focus issue of the year, but also as the most read focus issue in ECS history.
By: Neal Dawson-Elli, Seong Beom Lee, Manan Pathak, Kishalay Mitra, and Venkat R. Subramanian
This article refers to a recently published open access paper in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, “Data Science Approaches for Electrochemical Engineers: An Introduction through Surrogate Model Development for Lithium-Ion Batteries.”
Image via Neal Dawson-Elli
(Click to enlarge.)
Data science is often hailed as the fourth paradigm of science. As the computing power available to researchers increases, data science techniques become more and more relevant to a larger group of scientists. A quick literature search for electrochemistry and data science will reveal a startling lack of analysis done on the data science side. This paper is an attempt to help introduce the topics of data science to electrochemists, as well as to analyze the power of these methods when combined with physics-based models.
At the core of the paper is the idea that one cannot be successful treating every problem as a black box and applying liberal use of data science – in other words, despite its growing popularity, it is not a panacea. The image shows the basic workflow for using data science techniques – the creation of a dataset, splitting into training-test pairs, training a model, and then evaluating the model on some task. In this case, the training data comes from many simulations of the pseudo two-dimensional lithium-ion battery model. However, in order to get the best results, one cannot simply pair the inputs and outputs and train a machine learning model on it. The inputs, or features, must be engineered to better highlight changes in your output data, and sometimes the problem needs to be totally restructured in order to be successful.
Deadline: March 1, 2018
The ECS honors and awards program promotes technical achievements in electrochemistry and solid-state science and technology. The program also recognizes exceptional service to the Society. Recognition opportunities exist in the following categories: Society awards, division awards and section awards.
The Sensor Division Outstanding Achievement Award was established in 1989 to recognize outstanding achievement in research and/or technical contributions to the field of sensors and to encourage work excellence in the field. The award consists of a framed certificate and a $1,000 prize. The next award winner will be recognized at the 234th ECS biannual meeting, also known as AiMES2018, which takes place in Cancun, Mexico from September 30 thru October 4.
The 2016 winner of this award was Rangachary Mukundan of Los Alamos National Laboratory who presented an award talk, “Mixed Potential Sensors for Hydrogen Safety and Automotive Applications at our last PRiME meeting in Hawaii.”
Image via Michael Geminder
Scientists have developed energy efficient, ultra-thin light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for next-generation communication technologies.
Light sources that reliably convert electrical to optical signals are of fundamental importance to information processing technologies. Energy-efficient and high-speed LEDs that can be integrated onto a microchip and transmit information are one of the key elements in enabling high volume data communication.
Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, graphene-like, atomically thin materials, have recently attracted significant interest due to their size (just a few atoms thick), well-defined light emission properties, and their prospects for on-chip integration. While, in recent years, researchers have succeeded in fabricating LEDs based on these materials, realizing efficient light emission has remained a challenge.
An efficient LED device converts most of its electrical power input into light emission (i.e., with minimal losses due to conversion into other forms of energy such as heat). Previous studies on LEDs based on 2D semiconductors reported that a large amount of electrical current is needed to trigger light emission. This means that a substantial fraction of the input electrical power is dissipated as heat instead of generating light.
The ECS honors and awards program promotes technical achievements in electrochemistry and solid-state science and technology. The program also recognizes exceptional service to the Society. Recognition opportunities exist in the following categories: Society awards, division awards and section awards.
The Canada Section Student Award was established in 1987 to recognize promising young engineers and scientists in the field of electrochemical power sources. The award is intended to encourage the recipients to initiate or continue careers in the field. The award recipient will receive a $1,500 (CAD) prize and have the chance to present an award talk to section constituents. The next award winner will be recognized at the Canada Section annual meeting in fall 2018.
The ECS Transactions (ECST) enhanced issues for the 233rd ECS Meeting in Seattle, WA, have just opened to submissions.
The following Seattle symposia will be publishing enhanced issues of ECST:
