Photo: UCL Interactive Architecture Lab

Few of us are lucky enough to have a green thumb. The perfect balance of sunlight, climate, and water requires a special, intuitive touch. A little too much water, a little too little, and turns into gunk or withers. A little too much sun, a little too little, and wastes away and shrivels. And, so it goes.

Well, gardening just got a little easier. According to Inhabitat, students at University College London’s Interactive Architecture Lab have designed a nomadic, self-driving, and self-cultivating garden named Hortum machina, B. Like an autonomous car, the mobile garden responds to the environment, in this case, moving towards or away from sunlight, shade, and unhealthy levels of air pollution, as needed. (more…)

New energy system prototype from Chalmers University that can store the sun’s energy for up to 18 years. Image by: Chalmers University of Technology

According to Science Alert, scientists have recently figured out a way to store solar power for up to 18 years.

It’s made possible with a specialised fluid, called a solar thermal fuel, that’s catching the attention of numerous investors, according to the research team at the Chalmers University of Technology working on the project. (more…)

Summer 2018 was a good one for Aashutosh Mistry and Haegyeom Kim. Both were awarded ECS Summer Fellowships to further explore their research within a lab and to advance within their fields.

Aashutosh Mistry, recipient of the Edward G. Weston Summer Fellowship.

“The ECS Summer Fellowship program offered me the time and money to explore questions and pursue research I couldn’t explore during my PhD. Without the fellowship, I couldn’t have done this,” says Aashutosh Mistry, a PhD student at Purdue University.

Mistry is one of five recipients of the 2018 ECS Summer Fellowship program designed to assist students during the summer months, June through August, in the pursuit of work in a field of interest to ECS. He is just one example of how the fellowship directly effects and encourages young researchers to explore and expand their studies.

Mistry explains that during his PhD study, he’d often discover problems he thought were worth pursuing. However, because these problems were not considered part of the main objective of the project, and also considering deadlines and time constraints, Mistry did not have the flexibility to explore these questions.

“You often cannot pursue these science questions, which, at end of the day, ties back into the project,” says Mistry, adding, “These things they take time.”

The Edward G. Weston Summer Fellowship offered him the opportunity to dive into these very questions. (more…)

Have you ever picked up your cell, looked at the battery life, and go, “But I just charged this thing. What gives?” It’s not just you. According to The Washington Post, the smartphones battery life is getting worse. And, chances are, you’re new and upgraded 2018 smartphone’s battery life is actually worse than older models.

Phone makers have claimed to have tackled this battle by including more-efficient processors, low-power modes, and artificial intelligence to manage app drain, but it’s no secret to the battery industry that the lithium-ion batteries in smartphones have hit a plateau.

So, what gives? According to Nadim Maluf, CEO of a firm that optimizes batteries called Qnovos, batteries improve at a very slow pace, about 5 percent per year. (more…)

According to The Verge, MIT is investing $1 billion into an AI college due to an ongoing drought of AI developers and researchers. The hope is that the new college, The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, will act as both a global center for computing research and education, and an intellectual foundry for powerful new AI tools, according to MIT President L. Rafael Reif.

The new college will train students from a broad range of disciplines and fields, like biology, chemistry, physics, politics, history, and linguistics. MIT’s goal with this is two. First, to examine ethical considerations relevant to computing and AI by including diverse perspectives; second, to teach a wide scope of students what they believe is “the bilinguals of the future.” (more…)

George E. Blomgren is the author of “The Development and Future of Lithium Ion Batteries,” the most-downloaded Journal of The Electrochemical Society paper since April 2017. To put this in perspective, Blomgren’s article has had 26,817 downloads this year. That is over 4.4 times the average amount received by the next nine most-downloaded JES papers for this year. Since its publication in December 2016, Blomgren’s paper has been downloaded a total of 53,575 times.

We decided to revisit the man with the incredible stats, and ask, how did you do it?

(more…)

Deadline for Submitting Abstracts
December 28, 2018
Submit today!

Topic Close-up #4

Symposium A06: Battery Safety and Failure Modes

Symposium Focus: Energy storage needs for advanced industrial and consumer electronics devices demand increasingly higher lithium-ion battery (LIB) specific energy and power densities. Increased LIB functionality via higher specific energy, extremely fast charging, and sophisticated management systems increases the need for a better understanding of LIB safety. (more…)

Deadline for Submitting Abstracts
December 28, 2018
Submit today!

Topic Close-up #2

Symposium A04: Battery Student Slam 3

Symposium Focus: This special symposium is dedicated to students working on energy storage and energy conversion. In the student slam, we offer an opportunity for students to present flash oral presentations of their work in a 10-minute time slot. All students enrolled at any valid degree-granting institution may submit an abstract describing the presentation. Of particular interest are new materials and designs, performance studies, and modeling of all types of batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells, including aqueous, non-aqueous, polymer electrolytes, solid electrolytes, and flow systems. We strongly encourage students to submit their papers to this symposium instead of other symposia sponsored by the Battery Division at this meeting. (more…)

Deadline for Submitting Abstracts
December 28, 2018
Submit today!

Topic Close-up #3

Symposium I05: Heterogeneous Functional Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage 2

Symposium focus: This symposium will focus on the science that controls emergent properties in heterogeneous functional materials as a foundation for the design of functional material devices with performance not bounded by constituent properties.

Providing a unique venue for both contributed and invited speakers to present the latest advances in novel modeling approaches, advanced 3-D imaging and characterization techniques, novel material synthesis and manufacturing methods to create highly ordered material structure, and applications of heterogeneous functional materials in devices for energy conversion and storage.

This symposium especially encourages and welcomes contributed presentations. (more…)

2018 awards winners Han (left) and Lacey (right) with Caroline Cloutier (center) representing Mercedes Benz R&D.

Steven Lacey is one of the winners of the 2018 Battery Division Student Research Award sponsored by Mercedes-Benz Research & Development (check out the other winner, Fudong Han).

Lacey’s passion for electrochemistry and engineering began at a young age when he realized the need for a more fuel-efficient means of transportation while restoring classic cars with his father.

(more…)