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Dr. Yossef Elabd, professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has developed two fuel cell vehicle platforms for both present day enhancements and future innovation.
Image: Texas A&M University

The Electrochemical Society’s Yossef A. Elabd is using electrochemical science to work toward global sustainability with his new advancements in fuel cell car technology.

Elabd, an active member of ECS’s Battery Division, has developed two fuel cell vehicle platforms for both present day enhancements and future innovation – focusing not only on the science, but also the environment.

“I just want to drive my car with water vapor coming out the back of it,” Elabd said.

With this new technology and initiatives such as the ECS Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship, Elabd’s statement may become an achievable reality for many people in the near future.

The idea of the fuel cell vehicle is every environmentalist’s dream, but the current issues deal with the sustainability of the vehicle. The current fuel cell car uses a proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyte for its platinum-based electrodes.

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ECS student member Alireza Mahdavifar observes live bacteria moving inside the microfluidic channel.
Image: Georgia Tech/The Poultry Site

Along with a team of researchers out of Georgia Tech, ECS student member Alireza Mahdavifar has designed and fabricated the prototype of a microfluidic device that exploits cell movement to separate live and dead bacteria during food processing.

The research, entitled “A Nitrocellulose-Based Microfluidic Device for Generation of Concentration Gradients and Study of Bacterial Chemotaxis,” has been recently published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society.

The new development consists of a microfluidic device that exploits cell movement to separate live and dead bacterial during food processing. The device is novel due to the fact that while screening for foodborne pathogens, it can be difficult to distinguish between viable and non-viable bacteria. Mahdavifar and the team out of Georgia Tech responded to this issue by creating a device that can separate live cells from dead ones for real-time pathogen detection.

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Find openings in your area via the ECS job board.

ECS’s job board keeps you up-to-date with the latest career opportunities in electrochemical and solid state science. Check out the latest openings that have been added to the board.

P.S. Employers can post open positions for free!

Post Doc (NIR/EIS)
Irstea – Montpellier, France
This Post Doc is integrated to a binational project, NEXT. The goal of this project is to investigate the in-line and real-time use of novel holistic sludge descriptors to measure, monitor, model and predict sludge behaviour through sludge treatment processes and use this knowledge for the optimization of design and operation of treatment processes. It will lean on previous works developed by two Irstea teams (on the one hand on organic fluids characterisation based on electrical measurements and rheology and on the other hand on near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy on turbid fluids and soils).

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The aluminum-air battery has the potential to serve as a short-term power source for electric vehicles.
Image: Journal of The Electrochemical Society

A new long-life aluminum-air battery is set to resolve challenges in rechargeable energy storage technology, thanks to ECS member Ryohei Mori.

Mori’s development has yielded a new type of aluminum-air battery, which is rechargeable by refilling with either salt or fresh water.

The research is detailed in an open access article in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, where Mori explains how he modified the structure of the previous aluminum-air battery to ensure a longer battery life.

Theoretically, metal-air technology can have very high energy densities, which makes it a promising candidate for next-generation batteries that could enable such things as long-range battery-electric vehicles.

However, the long-standing barrier of anode corrosion and byproduct accumulation have halted these batteries from achieving their full potential. Dr. Mori’s recently published paper, “Addition of Ceramic Barriers to Aluminum-Air batteries to Suppress By-product Formation on Electrodes,” details how to combat this issue.

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Thanks for participating in our survey about what you want the new electrochem.org (link to the current site – new site coming in the 4th quarter) to look like. We had over 500 people respond with some great suggestions. Thanks so much! Here’s a little peek inside.

(BTW: We picked a winner for the gift card too, waiting for confirmation and I’ll share the name. Check your email!)

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Each year ECS awards up to five Summer Fellowships to assist students in continuing their graduate work during the summer months in a field of interest to the Society. Congratulations to the five Summer Fellowship recipients for 2014. The Society thanks the Summer Fellowship Committee for their work in reviewing the applications and selecting five excellent recipients. Applications for the 2015 Summer Fellowships are due January 15, 2015.

Get more information here.

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ECS member Jiaxing Huang used freshman-level chemistry to solve the solubility mystery of graphene oxide films.
Image: Northwestern University

Sometimes science can be extremely complex and commanded by technical expertise. But there are moments when one has to go back to his roots to find a more simple answer for a complex issue. That is what ECS member Jiaxing Huang – along with a team of Northwestern University researchers – has done in order to solve the mystery that surrounds the solubility of graphene oxide films.

For years, one question has puzzled the materials science community – why are graphene oxide (GO) films highly stable in water?

When submerged, GO sheets become negatively charged and repel, which should cause membrane to disintegrate. Though much to the confusion of the scientific community, when GO sheets are submerged they stabilize.

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X-ray absorption spectra, interpreted using first-principles electronic structure calculations, provide insight into the solvation of the lithium ion in propylene carbonate.
Image: Rich Saykally, Berkeley Labs

The Electrochemical Society’s Stephen Harris, along with a team of researchers from  Berkeley Lab, have found a possible avenue to a better electrolyte for lithium-ion batteries.

Harris – an expert on lithium-ion batteries and chemist at Berkeley Lab’s Materials Science Division – believes that he and his team have unveiled something that could lead to applying lithium-ion batteries to large-scale energy storage.

Researchers around the world know that in order for lithium-ion batteries to store electrical energy for the gird or power electric cars, they must be improved. The team at Berkeley decided to take on this challenge and found surprising results in the first X-ray absorption spectroscopy study of a model lithium electrode, which has provided a better understanding of the liquid electrolyte.

Previous simulations have predicted a tetrahedral solvation structure for the lithium-ion electrolyte, but the new study yields different results.

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Find openings in your area via the ECS job board.

ECS’s job board keeps you up-to-date with the latest career opportunities in electrochemical and solid state science. Check out the latest openings that have been added to the board.

P.S. Employers can post open positions for free!

Director of Publications
The Electrochemical Society – Pennington, New Jersey
Serves as senior staff member responsible for the overall strategic direction of the ECS publications (journals, ECS Transactions, and Interface) and all content in the ECS Digital Library. Assists with the creation and implementation of special projects and initiatives that advance the mission of the organization, which is to provide the greatest possible dissemination of the technical content. Strives to make ECS the top publisher in electrochemical and solid state science, maintaining consistency with ECS mission, goals, and objectives.

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