ECS Transactions 80(10) “Selected Proceedings from the 232nd ECS Meeting: National Harbor, MD – Fall 2017,” has just been published.

This issue contains a total of 149 papers from the following National Harbor symposia:

A01 – Battery and Energy Technology Joint General Session

A02 – Battery Characterization: Symposium in Honor of Frank McLarnon

A03 – Battery Student Slam 2

A04 – Li-Ion Batteries

A05 – Battery Materials: Beyond Li-Ion

A06 – Advanced Manufacturing Methods for Energy Storage Devices

B01 – Carbon Nanostructures: From Fundamental Studies to Applications and Devices

C01 – Corrosion General Session

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The following are the updated guidelines for submitting student chapter updates for publication in Interface.

ECS encourages submissions of news from student chapters. Therefore, we try to keep the rules to a minimum. However, some guidance will help in preparing the material.

Point of View: Compose your submission in third person.

Timeliness: Interface is published every three months – spring, summer, fall, and winter. It is best that your chapter update includes information about events, initiatives, accomplishments, etc., from within the last three to six months.

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The following is a roundup of the most downloaded episodes of the ECS Podcast in 2017.

1. Steven Chu talks climate and energy

Former U.S. Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate, Steven Chu, delivered the ECS Lecture at the year’s 232nd ECS Lecture. Before he gave the talk, he sat down with ECS Executive Director Roque Calvo for an episode of the ECS Podcast.

“I think as a scientist, you have to be optimistic because usually what you’re doing is trying to shoot for the moon,” Chu said during the podcast. “My optimism comes from the fact that you’ve got a whole bunch of very smart people who are focused on all of the technical problems in the world, including sustainability, energy, and climate change.”

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ECS members M. Stanley Whittingham and Yury Gogotsi will be panelists at the upcoming “Electrical Energy Storage Technologies That Enable the Future” symposium, hosted by the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The event will take place on January 11, 2018 in Philadelphia, PA. Read the full program below.

Moderator
Daryl Boudreaux, Principal, Boudreaux & Associates

Panelists
M. Stanley Whittingham, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering, SUNY Binghamton

Yury Gogotsi, Distinguished University Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Drexel University

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Nokia recently announced the top three winners of its fourth annual Bell Labs Prize, which recognizes disruptive technology innovations with the potential to solve the critical challenges humanity faces within the next 10 years.

Click to enlarge.

This year’s competition attracted more than 330 proposals from 35 countries, which were narrowed down to around 20 semifinal applications shortlisted for collaboration with Bell Labs researchers over a two-month period. These refined semifinal proposals were then reviewed by the Bell Labs leadership team and the nine finalists selected, with each finalist having the chance to extend their collaboration with leading researchers at Bell Labs.

The nine finalist applications covered topics ranging from new approaches to machine learning, new materials synthesis, new human sensory technologies, new distributed computing paradigms, new battery technologies and new programmable radio and antenna technologies. The final judging event took place with a group of seven luminaries in the STEM field.

Joint second prize was awarded to ECS member Colm O’Dwyer, Professor of Chemistry at University College in Cork, Ireland, and Chair of the Electronics & Photonics Division of ECS, for his invention of a new class of 3D-printed batteries that could be incorporated into virtually any form factor, enabling new kinds of wearable devices with medical, health, communications and other future applications.

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The following article was originally published in the winter 2017 issue of Interface.

By: Roque J. Calvo, ECS Executive Director

United States President John F. Kennedy sent a powerful message to the country in his speech at Rice University in1962, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”

History has shown that it was not necessary to go to the Moon to win Kennedy’s challenge. His primary goal was to elevate U.S. national security during the Cold War when the Soviet Union was advancing as a world power and showing signs of superiority in their space program. The U.S. put a man on the Moon in 1969, but far more important was the spirit of innovation that was created, leading to world-changing new technologies in security, communications, and transportation, which was the true win.

Kennedy understood the importance of innovation and risk taking to the success of a nation and his speech permanently implanted this message into the ideal of science and the role it plays in advancing mankind. He continues to stimulate progress because in his words, “there is new knowledge to be gained … and used for the progress of all people.” It is amazing how Kennedy’s influence has prevailed. In a recent ECS podcast with Steven Chu,* the former U.S. Secretary of Energy and 1997 Nobel Prize winner said, “As a scientist, you better be an optimist … half the science I try to do is really shoot for the Moon.”

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Applying a tiny coating of costly platinum just 1 nanometer thick—about 1/100,000th the width of a human hair—to a core of much cheaper cobalt could bring down the cost of fuel cells.

This microscopic marriage could become a crucial catalyst in new fuel cells that use generate electricity from hydrogen fuel to power cars and other machines. The new fuel cell design would require far less platinum, a very rare metal that sold for almost $900 an ounce the day this article was produced.

“This technique could accelerate our launch out of the fossil-fuel era,” says Chao Wang, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins University and senior author of a study published in the journal Nano Letters.

“It will not only reduce the cost of fuel cells,” Wang says. “It will also improve the energy efficiency and power performance of clean electric vehicles powered by hydrogen.”

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A new quantum material mimics a shark’s ability to detect the minute electric fields of small prey.

Such a technology might be used to study ocean organisms and ecosystems and to monitor the movement of ships for military and commercial maritime applications, says Shriram Ramanathan, professor of materials engineering at Purdue University. “So, it has potentially very broad interest in many disciplines.”

The material maintains its functional stability and does not corrode after immersion in saltwater, a prerequisite for ocean sensing. Surprisingly, it also functions well in the cold, ambient temperatures typical of seawater.

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Earlier this year, a group in the ECS Corrosion Division mobilized a push to honor the work and memory of the late Hugh Isaacs, who passed away on December 5, 2016. Isaacs had been an ECS member since 1967 and is recognized as an ECS fellow.

The group unified donors among Isaacs’s family, friends, and colleagues in an effort to commemorate all he contributed as an impassioned champion of electrochemical science and engineering, and as a preeminent figure in the corrosion community. Isaacs’s widow, Sheila Isaacs, contributed an anchor gift that helped make their endeavor possible.

Their work culminated in the creation of the Hugh Isaacs Collection, a sponsored collection containing all 45 of the articles Isaacs published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. The collection is currently available in the ECS Digital Library. Read now!

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The content below was published in the winter 2017 edition of Interface.

Each year ECS gives 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 four Summer Fellowship recipients for 2017. The Society thanks the Summer Fellowship Committee for their work in reviewing the applications and selecting four excellent recipients.

2017 Edward G. Weston Summer Research Fellowship

Mapping Nanoscale Ion Transport
Lushan Zhou

Transport of ions at small length scales plays critical roles in almost all physical and biophysical processes. Investigation of local ion transport properties requires tools for direct visualization of spatially distributed ions at interfaces. Scanning ion conductance microscopy (SICM), a scanned nanoscale pipette, allows high resolution non-contact topography
imaging of samples bathed in electrolyte and therefore is well-suited for nanoscale ion transport studies. Read more.

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