Upcoming Call for Nominations

Society Awards

Fellow of The Electrochemical Society: recognizing advanced individual technological contributions in the field of electrochemical and solid-state science and technology, and active ECS membership. Certificate and gold lapel pin. February 1, 2017.

Vittorio de Nora Award: recognizing distinguished contributions to the field of electrochemical engineering and technology. Gold medal, wall plaque, $7,500, complimentary meeting registration, awards dinner, and Society Life Membership. April 15, 2017.

Henry B. Linford Award: recognizing excellence in teaching in subject areas of interest to the Society. Silver medal, wall plaque, $2,500, complimentary meeting registration, awards dinner and Society Life Membership. April 15, 2017.

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Aloha!

As we are getting ready to go to PRiME 2016, we thought of some things we didn’t want you to forget!

Registration opens on Saturday at 1600h and at 0700h on Sunday at the Convention Center. When you go, you’ll only need to enter your last name at the kiosk and your badge will be printed for you.

Before you leave home, go here and log in and add a Short Course or a ticketed event.

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Deadline for Submitting Abstracts
Dec. 16, 2016
Submit today!

Topic Close-up #1

Symposium A06: Battery Student Slam 1

Symposium Focus on the first ever Battery Student Slam is meant to provide lively and engaging presentations by students early in their research careers. The symposium is only open to submissions from students pursuing degrees at the undergraduate or graduate levels. Students will give 10 minute presentations about their research followed by 2 minutes of questions and discussion from the audience. All topics of relevance to battery research and in areas previously sponsored by the Battery Division are welcome.

Featuring the top three presentations will be recognized with cash prizes and awards as judged by the symposium organizers!

Learn about all the New Orleans topics!

We’re delving into our archives as part of our continuing Masters Series podcasts. In 1995, ECS and the Chemical Heritage Foundation worked to compile various oral histories of some of the biggest names in electrochemical and solid state science.

One key figure is Charles Tobias. Often referred to as the “father of electrochemical engineering.” Tobias took a field that deals with the effects of electricity produced by chemical reaction and gave it a sound scientific footing.

Throughout his years at Berkeley, Tobias influenced the lives of many students and faculty members. He was not only a scholar, but a role model and friend to many – especially at ECS where he served as the Society’s president from 1970-71.

Listen and download these episodes and others for free through the iTunes Store, SoundCloud, or our RSS Feed. You can also find us on Stitcher.

Cards Against Humanity, the comedy card game, has announced that applications are now being accepted for their Science Ambassador Scholarship. The scholarship is geared to award full-tuition to young women seeking undergraduate degrees in STEM.

This year, one winner will be selected by a board of sixty women in STEM to receive full tuition coverage for up to four years.

“I’m so excited that we’re able to offer another scholarship for a woman studying STEM. A lot of us at Cards Against Humanity have backgrounds in science and tech, and the under-representation of women in these fields is staggering,” says Jenn Bane, the Cards Against Humanity community director. “Ask a kid to draw a scientist, they’ll draw a man in a lab coat, because science and math are historically male-dominated fields. Cards Against Humanity has a large audience, so with the Science Ambassador Scholarship we hope to help change the public perception of what a scientist looks like.”

To apply, applicants must submit a three-minute video explaining a scientific topic they’re passionate about. Find more details here.

PS: If you want to contribute to the fund, you can pick up the Science Pack to add to your Cards Against Humanity Deck. All profits go to the Science Ambassador Scholarship.

Lithium-air batteries are viewed by many as a potential next-generation technology in energy storage. With the highest theoretical energy density of all battery devices, Li-air could revolutionize everything from electric vehicles to large-scale grid storage. However, the relatively young technology has a few barriers to overcome before it can be applied. A new study published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) is taking a fundamental step forward in advancing Li-air through the development of mixed metal catalyst that could lead to more efficient electrode reactions in the battery.

The paper, entitled “In Situ Formed Layered-Layered Metal Oxide as Bifunctional Catalyst for Li-Air Batteries,” details a cathode catalyst composed of three transition metals (manganese, nickel, and cobalt), which can create the right oxidation state during the battery cycling to enable both the catalysis of the charge and the discharge reaction.

Future opportunities

According to K.M. Abraham, co-author of the paper, the manganese allows for the catalysis of the oxygen reduction reaction while the cobalt catalyzes the charge reaction of the battery.

“This offers opportunities for future research to develop similar materials to optimize the catalysis of the Li-air battery using one material that will combine the functions of these mixed metal oxides,” Abraham says.

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Image: NYU’s Jerschow Lab

Researchers from New York University have developed a new technique to give a highly detailed, 3D look inside a lithium-ion battery.

“One particular challenge we wanted to solve was to make the measurements 3D and sufficiently fast, so that they could be done during the battery charging cycle,” explains Alexej Jerschow, co-author of the study that details the development. “This was made possible by using intrinsic amplification processes, which allow one to measure small features within the cell to diagnose common battery failure mechanisms. We believe these methods could become important techniques for the development of better batteries.”

The look that the researchers offer gives new insight to dendrites – the deposits that build up inside a Li-ion battery that can affect performance and safety. To do this, the team used MRI technology to focus the image and took an additional step to improve image quality.

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Corrosion costs the U.S. economy over $450 billion per year. In an effort to better predict the effects of corrosion, ECS Fellow Robert Kelly has built something akin to a time machine at the University of Virginia.

Kelly, who has recently been awarded ECS’s Corrosion Division H. H. Uhlig Award, is launching pieces of metal into the future to accelerate corrosion rates and observe how they will degrade over time. Being able to see the degradation of materials prior to application could be key to drastically cutting funds used to repair infrastructure when corrosion takes its toll.

Recently, Kelly applied his testing technique to Rolls-Royce’s small jet engine compressor blades to see how they would inevitably hold up in an airplane turbine. By aggressively spraying salt on the parts, Kelly could effectively predict how it will react when jet engines take in salt water in the form of sea salt aerosols. Rolls-Royce currently coats the blades with ceramic material – which if used in too small a quantity could lead to corrosion, but if used in too excessive a quantity could lead to slow, heavy blades. The tests conducted by Kelly and his team could help the company create a blade with the perfect balance of ceramic coating.

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Image: Forschungszentrum Juelich

Artificial photosynthesis has carved out a promising corner in renewable energy research in recent history. This novel process is solar-driven, harvesting renewable energy and storing in in chemical bonds. Breakthroughs in artificial photosynthesis could lead to the development of solar fuels that could potentially shift the energy infrastructure.

However, while many technological barriers have been surpassed in the advancement of artificial photosynthesis, there are still hurdles to overcome. However, a research team from Forschungszentrum Juelich believes they may have just taken a significant step forward in the advancement of this field.

In a recently published paper, the team of scientists state that they have developed the first complete and compact design for an artificial photosynthesis facility.

The artificial photosynthesis process was first investigated in the 1970s. In fact, ECS Fellow Allen J. Bard can be seen here discussing the process in 1983. But only recently has artificial photosynthesis began to garner larger amounts of attention from the scientific community as a whole.

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Image: CSAW, CC BY-ND

Each morning seems to bring new reports of hacks, privacy breaches, threats to national defense or our critical infrastructure and even shutdowns of hospitals. As the attacks become more sophisticated and more frequently perpetrated by nation-states and criminal syndicates, the shortage of defenders only grows more serious: By 2020, the cyber security industry will need 1.5 million more workers than will be qualified for jobs.

In 2003, I founded Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) with a group of students, with the simple goal of attracting more engineering students to our cyber security lab. We designed competitions allowing students to participate in real-world situations that tested both their knowledge and their ability to improvise and design new solutions for security problems. In the past decade-plus, our effort has enjoyed growing interest from educators, students, companies and governments, and shows a way to closing the coming cyber security workforce shortage.

Today, with as many as 20,000 students from around the globe participating, CSAW is the largest student-run cyber security event in the world. Recruiters from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and many large corporations observe and judge each competition. (Registration for this year’s competition is still open for a little while.)

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