ECS is currently accepting nominations for the following award of the Luminescence and Display Materials Division:

LDM Outstanding Achievement Award was established in 2002 (the Centennial Year of The Electrochemical Society) to encourage excellence in luminescence and display materials research and outstanding technical contributions to the field of luminescence and display materials science. The award consists of a scroll and a $1,000 prize. The recipient is required to attend the designated Society meeting to receive the award and give a lecture to the LDM Division.

Extended Deadline: April 15, 2016

We’ve talked about ORCID identifiers quite a bit here at ECS. From the top five reasons to sign up for ORCID to the publishing benefits of the identifiers, we’re strong believers in ORCID’s place in the ever-expanding and international nature of scientific literature.

Recently, The Royal Society announced that it would require all authors submitting to their journals to have an ORCID iD. Additionally, seven other publishers – including PLOS and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers – join The Royal Society, requiring author to have ORCID iDs starting in 2016.

Stuart Taylor, publishing director of The Royal Society, recently sat down with The Scholarly Kitchen to discuss why ORCID is such an important and promising thing in the current climate of scholarly publications.

Read the article.

Image: Penn State

With the newly popular hoverboards bursting into flames, safety in batteries has made its way to the public spotlight. To increase lithium ion battery safety, one ECS member is working to develop batteries with built in sensors to warn users of potential problems.

Chao-Yang Wang, 19-year ECS member, is taking on the challenge of making the highly popular lithium ion battery safer in light of demands for smaller, more energy efficient devices.

“Li-ion batteries essentially provide portable power for everything,” says Wang. “Your cell phone charge can now last for a week instead of a day, but it’s still the same size. The battery has a lot more energy density, you are compressing more and more energy into a smaller space, and you have to be careful when you do that. Our job is to come up with solutions to provide safety while at the same time increasing performance.”

While lithium ion batteries are typically safe under normal conditions, the battery’s flammable electrolyte solution could overheat and catch fire if it is punctured or overcharged.

(more…)

Deadline for Submitting Abstracts
April 15, 2016
Submit today!

Topic Close-up

SYMPOSIUM H04: Low-Dimensional Nanoscale Electronic and Photonic Devices 9

FOCUSED ON the most recent developments in nanoscale transparent electronic, photonic materials, and devices. The symposium will encompass low dimensional and transparent novel materials and devices, processing, device fabrication, reliability, and other related topics.

NOTING THAT the symposium includes materials preparation, growth, processing, devices, chemistry, physics, theory and applications, it also provides a forum for researchers, scientists and engineers from different countries worldwide, who are actively involved in all forms of research on low dimensional nanomaterials related to electronic and photonic devices and properties. Learn about all the topics!

Did You Know?

Students can be eligible for the General Student Poster Session awards by submitting an abstract to Z01 – General Society Student Poster Session.

Important Dates

• Take advantage of exhibition and sponsorship opportunities:
  Deadline: June 15, 2016

Full papers presented at ECS meetings will be published in ECS Transactions.

Submit today!

Do not forget that the IMLB 2016 abstract submission site is scheduled to close this Friday, January 15!

In order to make things easier for you, we will keep the submission system open through the day of Monday, January 18. Please make sure to get your abstract in as soon as possible so you can present your latest work to lithium-ion battery researchers from around the world.

Don’t miss your chance to participate in IMLB 2016, make sure to submit your abstract before January 18, 2016!

Submit today!

Thomas Fuller, JES Technical Editor, and guest editors
Bryan Pivovar, Kathy Ayers, Marcelo Carmo, Jim O’Brien, and
Xiaoyu Zhang, invite you to submit to the:

JES Focus Issue:

Electrolysis for Increased Renewable Energy Penetration

Submission Deadline | April 7, 2016

This special issue of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society focuses on electrolysis. Interest in this area has increased significantly with focus on several different technological approaches, each with their own unique challenges. Examples include, cost challenges for PEM water electrolysis, and thermal and durability challenges for high-temperature, solid-oxide electrolysis.

Topics of interest to this special issue of JES include, but are not limited to:

• Novel approaches for electrocatalysts including nanostructures with enhanced activities, durability, and cost reduction
• Fundamental studies of the chemical processes on solid surfaces and triple-phase-boundaries
• Polymers, ion conducting ceramics, membranes, and electrodes for electrolysis applications
• New approaches on the design and characterization of membrane/separator components
• New architectures for porous transport medias and bipolar plates

Read more topics of interest.

Submission Deadline | April 7, 2016

We invite original contributions from both fundamental and applied work that falls in the technical areas of interest of JES readership.

Please submit manuscripts at http://ecsjournals.msubmit.net.

Papers accepted into this focus issue are published online within 10 days of acceptance. The issue is created online an article at a time with the final article published in September 2016.

The deadline for nominations for the Edward Goodrich Acheson Award has been extended to March 1, 2016.

The Edward Goodrich Acheson Award, one of the oldest and most prestigious ECS honors, was established in 1928 for distinguished contributions to the advancement of any of the objects, purposes or activities of The Electrochemical Society. Read the nomination rules.

The recipient shall be a longstanding member of and established volunteer leader within ECS.  He or she will also be distinguished for contributions consisting of:  (a) discovery pertaining to electrochemical and/or solid state science and technology, (b) invention of a plan, process or device or research evidenced by a paper embodying information useful, valuable, or significant in the theory or practice of electrochemical and/or solid state science and technology.

Did you know that since 1929, ECS has presented the Acheson Award 43 times? Of that number, 33 award winners have also served the organization as President. The most recent recipient of this award was Ralph Brodd in 2014, the 79th ECS President who was esteemed for over 40 years of experience in the battery industry. Perhaps you know an ECS Past President worthy of the 2016 Acheson award. Start the nomination process today.

Edward Goodrich Acheson (1856 – 1931) was an American chemist and the 6th President of The Electrochemical Society who invented the Acheson process, which is still used to make silicon carbide (carborundum) and later a manufacturer of carborundum and graphite. Acheson worked with Thomas Edison and experimented on making a conducting carbon to be used in the electric light bulb.

When we think of energy, often large-scale grid storage or sleek, highly-efficient lithium ion batteries that power most of our electronics are the first things that come to mind. However, for applications such as biomedical or environmental monitoring devices, there could be an alternative way to harness energy without the use of pricy technology.

Researchers have discovered the through harnessing the energy crated by small motions, a small but unlimited power supply could be generated. With electrochemical principals as the backbone of the study, MIT researchers have developed a new way to harvest energy from natural motions and activates, including something as simple as walking.

The system is based on the slight bending of a sandwich of metal and polymer sheets.

This from MIT:

Most previously designed devices for harnessing small motions have been based on the triboelectric effect (essentially friction, like rubbing a balloon against a wool sweater) or piezoelectrics (crystals that produce a small voltage when bent or compressed). These work well for high-frequency sources of motion such as those produced by the vibrations of machinery. But for typical human-scale motions such as walking or exercising, such systems have limits.

(more…)

The seventh row of the periodic table has been completed with the addition of four new elements. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPC) has officially filled slots 113, 115, 117, and 118 with the tentatively ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium, and ununoctium.

These are the first new elements to be officially added to the period table since felrovium and livermorium in 2011.

This from PBS:

Japan’s RIKEN Institute has been credited for the discovery of ununtrium (113), while ununpentium (115), ununseptium (117) and ununoctium (118) were discovered by scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia; California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Read the full article.

“The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row,” Professor Jan Reedijk, President of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of IUPAC, said in a statement.

An interdisciplinary team from multiple institutions in South Korea has recently developed a novel stretchable memory device that can be applied to the skin and used to monitor heart rate, which they believe outpaces current biosensor technology in this field.

With bio-data capturing devices on the rise in popular culture, researchers are working to increase efficiency and stability in these devices. The main problem with the current technologies is that the devices do not sit close enough to the skin. To combat this issues, the researchers have developed a new array that can be applied directly to the skin and can withstand stretching.

The memory array is nonvolatile and made from fully multiplexed silicon and nanocrystal floating gates. The resulting device architecture built by the team is approximately the size of a human thumb and consists of two main parts, an array of ECG electrodes that are used for reading the heart rate, and the memory array—the two are connected together by a bit of electronics that also serve as amplifiers. The result is a patch-like device that is able to be stretched because the membrane material between each of the tiny squares circuits that make up both of the arrays, is flexible.

Read the full article.