Harry Atwater is working on the forefront of alternative energy technologies. From his research in solar fuels to his innovation in photovoltaics, Atwater’s work addresses the energy crisis and strives to provide a more secure, sustainable future.

Currently, Atwater is the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Director of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP). You can catch Atwater at the fifth international ECS Electrochemical Energy Summit, taking place October 12^th through the 14^th 2015 in Phoenix, AZ.

Listen and download this episode and others for free through the iTunes Store, SoundCloud, or our RSS Feed. You can also find us on Stitcher.

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New issues of ECS Transactions have now been published from the upcoming 228th ECS Meeting in Phoenix, to be held October 11-16, 2015. 

Seventeen “enhanced” issues of ECST are now available. They will also be for sale at ECS Central at the meeting next to Registration.

As always, issues of ECST are continuously updated, and all full-text papers will be published here as soon as they are available. Get currently published issues of ECST. To be notified of newly published articles or volumes, please subscribe to the ECST RSS feed.

Research out of the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) has yielded a novel micro-supercapacitor that has reportedly reached an energy density 1,000 times greater than current electrochemical capacitors.

This unmatched energy storage performance was made possible through a new electrode, producing density levels comparable to that of current lithium-ion micro-batteries.

Applications of this new technology could range from small electronics to autonomous sensor networks, opening the door to better water quality and air pollution monitoring.

“The extent of the electrode’s surface and the presence of pores of various sizes are key to a large storage capacity. We designed this new 3D electrode using an electrochemical process to synthesize a very porous gold structure. Ruthenium oxide, a pseudocapacitative material featuring high electrical conductivity and very good cyclability, was then inserted into the structure, resulting in unsurpassed energy density. For this type of application, component sizes are reduced to a few square millimeters, making it possible to use such expensive materials,” said Daniel Guay, ECS member and co-author of the study.

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Peer Review Week is still going strong, with publishers and reviewers across the globe chiming in with astute articles and intelligent commentary. Here at ECS, we’ve gotten insight from one of our associate editors, looked at how the peer review process works, and examined how it has become the heart of scholarly publication.

Now we’d like to take a moment to thank our reviewers, who use their technical expertise to help us maintain high-quality publication standards in all four of our peer reviewed journals. Take a look at these tips for peer reviewers.

PS: Want to publish with ECS? Find out how.

Deadline for Submitting Abstracts
December 11, 2015
Submit Today!

Topic Close-up #5

SYMPOSIUM I05: Heterogeneous Functional Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage.

FOCUSED ON the science that controls emergent properties in heterogeneous functional materials as a foundation for 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.

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The 2015 MacArthur Foundation geniuses have just been revealed, with seven prolific scientists receiving the prestigious title. Of those scientists, inorganic chemist Peidong Yang was named as one of this year’s geniuses for his pioneering work in nanomaterials science. His work is not only transformative for the science of semiconductor nanowires and nanowire photonics, it is also opening new paths for clean, renewable energy.

His research has led to innovative commercial productions for the conversion of waste heat to electricity, chemical sensors, and optical switches. Currently, Yang’s focus is directed toward artificial photosynthesis, where he and his research group have created a synthetic “leaf” that is a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria.

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Scott Lillard is currently the Professor & Carboline Endowed Chair in Corrosion at the University of Akron, where he leads academic research and is and major contributor to the establishment the university’s new Corrosion Engineering program. He has recently been appointed to the ECS Electrochemical Science & Technology (EST) Editorial Board as an Associate Editor for a two-year term beginning July 1, concentrating in the Corrosion Science and Technology Technical Interest Area.

What do you hope to accomplish in your new role as the EST Editorial Board Associate Editor?
I have some experience working on the board of some other journals, but I don’t think that’s what I really contribute. What I contribute is this idea of customer service. There are a number of reasons why people publish in the journal. It might be the appropriateness of the content or the impact factor, but the third reason is probably customer service. What does that mean? That means getting good peer reviews in a timely manner and treating the authors in a professional manner.

How do you think peer reviewed journals have changed over the years?
I think the goals of authors are the same as they were 20 years ago. They want to get their publication out to people in their field so they can read it. They want to do that in as timely a manner as possible. The way in which the process is expected to occur is much different now than it was 20 years ago. It would take you six or nine months to get reviews back. That’s just not expected anymore. Everything is expected to be much more efficient now. I think efficiency, speed, and customer service are the things that are changing.

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September 28-October 2, 2015 is the first Peer Review Week, and it’s a good a time to put a spotlight on good practice in peer review and celebrate all it brings to the scholarly communication process. At ECS, we are marking Peer Review Week with a look at how peer review works here, and what happens to your manuscript after you submit it.

Our authors already know that the preparation and submission of a scientific manuscript for peer review can be a lengthy process, involving not just the research work and writing of the paper, but also the collection of supporting pieces of information required to enable publication.

But what happens after you hit the “Submit” button?

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This week (September 28-October 2, 2015) marks the first-ever Peer Review Week, a community-driven movement to discuss and celebrate the peer review process. Peer Review Week serves as a forum to take a deeper look at the heart of scholarly communications.

Peer review is not only critical for assuring high-quality science is published, it is also a crucial part of how society perceives published science and how reputable it is to the world at large.

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Every year, around 300 million tires are thrown away in the United States alone. According to researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), those wasted tires could be used in supercapacitors for vehicles and the electric grid.

An ORNL team led by ECS member Parans Paranthaman has developed a technology that transforms scrap tires into supercapacitors, which could help power the nation and reduce the amount of waste to landfills simultaneously.

This from ORNL:

By employing proprietary pretreatment and processing, a team led by Parans Paranthaman has created flexible polymer carbon composite films as electrodes for supercapacitors. These devices are useful in applications for cars, buses and forklifts that require rapid charge and discharge cycles with high power and high energy density. Supercapacitors with this technology in electrodes saw just a 2 percent drop after 10,000 charge/discharge cycles.

Read the full article here.

“Those tires will eventually need to be discarded, and our supercapacitor applications can consume several tons of this waste,” Paranthaman said. “Combined with the technology we’ve licensed to two companies to convert scrap tires into carbon powders for batteries, we estimate consuming about 50 tons per day.”

With this novel process, old tires are supplying the key ingredient for supercapacitors.

“Each tire can produce carbon with a yield of about 50 percent with the ORNL process,” said Yury Gogotsi, ECS Fellow and co-author of the study. “If we were to recycle all of the scrap tires, which would translate into 1.5 million tons of carbon, which is half of the annual global production of graphite.”