ECS is pleased to announce that, thanks to a $20,000 donation, the 2018 volume of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society has been named in honor of ECS fellow Chung Chiun Liu.

The Chung Chiun Liu Leadership Collection will contain all of the content published in JES volume 165.

Liu is the Wallace R. Persons Professor of Sensor Technology & Control at Case Western Reserve University. He has been an ECS member for over 50 years. During this time, he has given many oral presentations and organized several symposia for Society meetings. He has also received the 2008 ECS Sensor Division Outstanding Achievement Award and many other accolades.

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In a recent survey of over 100 corresponding authors who published in ECS journals, over 55% of respondents said the speed from initial manuscript submission to publication was faster than expected, and nearly 25% said it was very fast.

The survey also asked the authors to rate ECS’s turnaround speed during specific periods of the publication process: (1) from initial submission to first decision, (2) from manuscript acceptance to receipt of page proofs, and (3) from manuscript acceptance to publication.

Here are the key takeaways:

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Fuel cells play a major role in creating a clean energy future, with a broad set of applications ranging from powering buildings to electrifying transportation. But, as with all emerging technologies, researchers have faced many barriers in developing affordable, efficient fuel cells and creating a way to cleanly produce the hydrogen that powers them.

In a new Perspective article, published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, researchers are aiming to tackle a fundamental debate in key reactions behind fuel cells and hydrogen production, which, if solved, could significantly bolster clean energy technologies.

In the open access article, “Perspective—Towards Establishing Apparent Hydrogen Binding Energy as the Descriptor for Hydrogen Oxidation/Evolution Reactions,” Yushan Yan and his coauthors from the University of Delaware provide an authoritative overview of work done in the areas of hydrogen oxidation and evolution, present key questions for debate, and provide paths for future innovation in the field.

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The Journal of The Electrochemical Society Focus Issue on Lithium-Sulfur Batteries: Materials, Mechanisms, Modeling, and Applications is now complete, with 18 open access papers published in the ECS Digital Library.

“Lithium sulfur batteries are in the focus of research at many hundreds of prominent research groups throughout the world and at several industrial firms as well,” says JES Technical Editor Doron Aurbach in the issue’s preface. “These batteries are highly attractive due to their theoretical high energy density, that may be 4–5 times higher compared to that of Li-ion batteries.”

The focus issue includes invited papers and selected papers from the 2017 Li-SM³ Conference.

“The important technical challenges of Li-S batteries are dealt with in the papers of this focus issue, including development of new sulfur cathodes, protected Li anodes, new electrolyte systems including solid state electrolytes, study of degradation mechanisms, in-situ spectroscopic efforts, surface and structural aspects,” Aurbach continues. “This focus issue of JES is indeed a very suitable epilogue for a very successful and fruitful meeting on a very “hot” topic in modern electrochemistry in general and advanced batteries in particular.”

Read the full JES Focus Issues on Lithium-Sulfur Batteries: Materials, Mechanisms, Modeling, and Applications.

Charles L. Hussey is Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Mississippi and professor of chemistry. He is a fellow of ECS and a recipient of the Society’s Max Bredig Award in Molten Salt and Ionic Liquid Chemistry. His scientific research with molten salts/ionic liquids has been directed at the electrochemistry and spectroscopy of d- and f-block elements, the electrodeposition of aluminum and corrosion-resistant aluminum-transition metal alloys, the electrodissolution of metals and alloys, and the electrochemical processing of spent nuclear fuel. Hussey was recently reappointed as technical editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society in the area of electrochemical/electroless deposition.

The Electrochemial Society: What has your experiences as a JES editor been like?

Charles Hussey: I was appointed as an associate editor in 2000 and continued in that role until 2011. As an associate editor, I handled manuscripts on all topics for JES and Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters. Handling a variety of topical manuscripts for JES and ESL was the job that needed to be done, and it was a very challenging and sometimes uncomfortable assignment, but also highly educational.

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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.

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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.

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On January 1, 2018, ECS eliminated all charges for color figures published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology (JSS).

Figures may now be represented in color at no cost to authors in print-on-demand issues of JES and JSS.

Please note: ECS no longer offers print subscriptions to volumes of JES or JSS. Print editions of individual issues within each volume are only available as print-on-demand copies.

To have your figures represented in color in a print-on-demand issue, you must indicate that you wish to have color figures in the issue on the financial information page of your submission form.

If you do not select this option, your color figures will be converted to black and white or grayscale in the print-on-demand issue.

ECS’s decision to eliminate color charges aligns closely with the Society’s continual efforts to Free the Science, removing the barriers impeding authors from publishing their research in the formats they believe to be the most accessible and impactful. Submit today!

Over 1,840 articles were published in ECS journals in 2017, ranging from battery technology to materials science. Among those articles, “The Development and Future of Lithium Ion Batteries” by ECS member of 48 years, George E. Blomgren, stood out as the most downloaded paper of the year, with over 25,000 downloads in total.

The open access paper was published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) and has held the number one top download spot for the majority of the year. In November 2017 alone, it hit a record-setting 4,080 downloads. Blomgren credited the paper’s outstanding success to the continued surging interest in lithium-ion batteries, a technology that has made its profound mark on consumer electronics such as cellphones and computers, and continues to be applied to emerging innovations ranging from large scale energy storage to electric vehicles.

The paper, which highlights the past, present, and future of battery science and technology, was published as part of the JES Focus Issue of Selected Papers from IMLB 2016 with Invited Papers Celebrating 25 Years of Lithium Ion Batteries. The focus issue contains contributions from veteran scientists considered by many to be founding fathers in lithium battery science, including Emanuel Peled, Tetsuya Osaka, Zempachi Ogumi, Jeff Dahn, Robert Huggins, and of course, Blomgren.

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