Deadline Extended: December 22, 2017

This focus issue of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) is devoted to proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) durability. Commercialization of light duty fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) was initiated in December 2014 and now three automakers offer FCVs. Commercial viability was enabled by R&D efforts that reduced the cost and extended the lifetime of FCV PEMFC systems by a projected >60% and 4x, respectively, over the past decade.

However, market share for FCVs has been limited thus far, primarily due to an insufficient hydrogen fueling infrastructure, but also to the still considerable cost of fuel cell systems able to reach the 8,000 h target lifetime. For example, it is recognized that a decrease in platinum loading negatively impacts durability. It is projected that a 5% world market share for FCVs will be reached in 2033. With substantial market share many years away and the considerable cost of current FCVs, research into the durability of materials for fuel cell systems that can concurrently lower the system cost will play a significant role in technology developments for many years to come. This focus issue of the JES will collect the most recent research papers and reviews of technical issues related to the durability of PEMFCs.

The deadline for submissions has been extended to December 22, 2017. Submit today!

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The ECS HTM Division is currently accepting nominations for the following award:

HTM Outstanding Achievement Award was established in 1984 to recognize excellence in high temperature materials research and outstanding technical contributions to the field of high temperature materials science. The award consists of a framed certificate, a $1,000 prize and complimentary meeting registration. The 2018 recipient is required to attend the 234th ECS biannual meeting (AiMES) in Cancun, Mexico in October of next year to receive the award and to give a lecture to the HTM division. The recipient is eligible for up to $1,000 toward travel expenses to facilitate attendance.

In 2016, Harlan Anderson won the award and presented the talk, “A Country Boy Finds Materials Science.”

Please review the award rules carefully before completing the application.

ECS recognizes outstanding technical achievements in electrochemistry and solid state science and technology through its Honors & Awards program. There are many deserving members of the High Temperature Materials Division among us and this is an opportunity to highlight their contributions.

Application Deadline: January 1, 2018

2018 Call for Nominations

“I won the Geoffrey Barker Medal in 1994 and was particularly delighted partly as this was one of the first times my work had been recognized in this way and also because my former supervisor, John Albery, was a previous winner.”

– ECS member Richard G. Compton, University of Oxford

This is the formal call for nominations for the Geoffrey Barker Medal of the RSC Electrochemistry Group for 2018.

The Geoffrey Barker medal is currently awarded on a roughly biennial basis by the Royal Society of Chemistry Electrochemistry Group to an electrochemist working in the UK or Ireland in recognition of their contributions to any field of electrochemistry. These contributions should be recognized internationally, and should strengthen the standing of UK and Irish electrochemistry.

Detailed information about the award, nomination procedure and required material can be found on the award website.

Nominations should be directed to the Group Secretary, Dr. Mark Symes, via email. The nomination deadline is 17:00 GMT on January 31, 2018.

By: Srikanth Saripalli, Texas A&M University

In early November, a self-driving shuttle and a delivery truck collided in Las Vegas. The event, in which no one was injured and no property was seriously damaged, attracted media and public attention in part because one of the vehicles was driving itself – and because that shuttle had been operating for only less than an hour before the crash.

It’s not the first collision involving a self-driving vehicle. Other crashes have involved Ubers in Arizona, a Tesla in “autopilot” mode in Florida and several others in California. But in nearly every case, it was human error, not the self-driving car, that caused the problem.

In Las Vegas, the self-driving shuttle noticed a truck up ahead was backing up, and stopped and waited for it to get out of the shuttle’s way. But the human truck driver didn’t see the shuttle, and kept backing up. As the truck got closer, the shuttle didn’t move – forward or back – so the truck grazed the shuttle’s front bumper.

As a researcher working on autonomous systems for the past decade, I find that this event raises a number of questions: Why didn’t the shuttle honk, or back up to avoid the approaching truck? Was stopping and not moving the safest procedure? If self-driving cars are to make the roads safer, the bigger question is: What should these vehicles do to reduce mishaps? In my lab, we are developing self-driving cars and shuttles. We’d like to solve the underlying safety challenge: Even when autonomous vehicles are doing everything they’re supposed to, the drivers of nearby cars and trucks are still flawed, error-prone humans.

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Researchers have captured organic nanoparticles colliding and fusing on video for the first time.

This unprecedented view of “chemistry in motion” will aid nanoscientists developing new drug delivery methods, as well as demonstrate how an emerging imaging technique opens a new window on a very tiny world.

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2018 Call for Nominations

This is the formal call for nominations for the Faraday Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Electrochemistry Group for 2018.

The Faraday Medal is currently awarded annually by the Electrochemistry Group of the RSC to an electrochemist working outside the UK and Ireland in recognition of their outstanding original contributions and innovation as a mid-career researcher in any field of electrochemistry.

Detailed information about the award, nomination procedure and required material can be found on the award page of the RSC’s website. You will also find a list of notable past medalists that include many ECS members.

Nominations should be directed to the Group Secretary, Dr. Mark Symes, via email. The nomination deadline is 17:00 GMT on January 31, 2018.

A nanoparticle that can help clean water of cadmium becomes toxic once taking in the metal. But research finds that organic matter, in this case from algae, reduces that toxicity.

Nanotechnology plays an important role in removing toxic chemicals found in the soil. Currently more than 70 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund sites are using or testing nanoparticles to remove or degrade environmental contaminants. One of these—nano-zero-valent iron—is widely used, though its effect on organisms has not been examined.

In a recent experiment, a team of scientists tested the effect of sulfurized nano-zero-valent iron (FeSSi) on a common freshwater alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii). They found that FeSSi picked up cadmium from a watery medium and alleviated cadmium toxicity to that alga for more than a month.

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By: Deepak Kumar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Stephen P. Long, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Vijay Singh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The aviation industry produces 2 percent of global human-induced carbon dioxide emissions. This share may seem relatively small – for perspective, electricity generation and home heating account for more than 40 percent – but aviation is one of the world’s fastest-growing greenhouse gas sources. Demand for air travel is projected to double in the next 20 years.

Airlines are under pressure to reduce their carbon emissions, and are highly vulnerable to global oil price fluctuations. These challenges have spurred strong interest in biomass-derived jet fuels. Bio-jet fuel can be produced from various plant materials, including oil crops, sugar crops, starchy plants and lignocellulosic biomass, through various chemical and biological routes. However, the technologies to convert oil to jet fuel are at a more advanced stage of development and yield higher energy efficiency than other sources.

We are engineering sugarcane, the most productive plant in the world, to produce oil that can be turned into bio-jet fuel. In a recent study, we found that use of this engineered sugarcane could yield more than 2,500 liters of bio-jet fuel per acre of land. In simple terms, this means that a Boeing 747 could fly for 10 hours on bio-jet fuel produced on just 54 acres of land. Compared to two competing plant sources, soybeans and jatropha, lipidcane would produce about 15 and 13 times as much jet fuel per unit of land, respectively.

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On November 14, 2017, Clarivate Analytics published its annual list of Highly Cited Researchers with the overarching declaration that “whether ‘Highly Cited’ or ‘Hot,’ these researchers are making a significant impact.”

Some of our most distinguished ECS members have been noted this year as the “world’s most influential scientific minds” often listed multiple times in the categories of physics, chemistry and materials science.

Below, find a short list of those members of The Electrochemical Society whose research on electrochemistry and solid state science and technology is shaping the scientific discourse. Read the full article.

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Researchers have traced the paths of three water channels in an ancient photosynthetic organism—a strain of cyanobacteria—to provide the first comprehensive, experimental study of how that organism uses and regulates water to create energy.

The finding advances photosynthesis research but also presents an advance in green fuels research.

Photosynthesis is the chemical conversion of sunlight into chemical energy via an electron transport chain essential to nearly all life on our planet. All plants operate by photosynthesis, as do algae and certain varieties of bacteria.

‘Damage trails’

To convert sunlight into a usable form of energy, photosynthetic organisms require water at the “active site” of the Photosystem II protein complex. But the channels through which water arrives at the active site are difficult to measure experimentally. Reactive oxygen species are produced at the active site and travel away from it, in the opposite direction as water, leaving a “damage trail” in their wake.

“We identified the damaged sites in Photosystem II using high-resolution mass spectrometry and found that they reveal several pathways centered on the active site and leading away from it all the way to the surface of the complex,” says lead study author Daniel A. Weisz, a postdoctoral researcher in biology at Washington University in St. Louis.

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