ECS is excited to announce a Book Sale, running now through Monday, September 7, 2015!

All in-stock Proceedings Volumes and many older issues of ECS Transactions are now on sale for the one-time price of $25 per title, plus shipping and handling.

This sale is for all in-stock Proceedings Volumes and for all in-stock, hard-copy issues of ECST that were published from 2005 through 2010. With almost 300 discounted titles, this is a clearance sale not to be missed!

Please see the linked PDF for available titles and instructions on ordering or go directly to the ECS Bookstore.

Quantities are very limited, so order today and save!

Also, please visit the Chicago page for the newest issues of ECST!

Attendees gathered together to network, discuss research, and collaborate with new associates.

The first international ECS Conference on Electrochemical Energy Conversion & Storage with SOFC-XIV convened in Glasgow, July 26-31, 2015, at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. More than 800 attendees, from over 40 countries explored three main symposium topics.

More than 400 oral presentations and 300 poster presentations added great depth to the scientific material presented in Glasgow.

The Organizers
Subhash Singhal (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, U.S.) and Koichi Eguchi (Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan) organized the section on Solid Oxide Fuel Cells, which covered all aspects of research, development, and engineering of solid oxide fuel cells.

Subhash Singhal at the SOFC banquet.

Section B focused on Batteries and was led by Peter Bruce (University of Oxford), Clare Grey (ALISTORE-European Research Institute), Stefan Freunberger (Graz University of Technology, Austria), and Jie Xiao (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, U.S.).

The Low Temperature Fuel Cells track, featuring presentations on low-temperature fuel cells, as well as electrolyzers and redox flow cells, was organized by Hubert Gasteiger (Technische Universität München, Germany), Deborah Jones (CNRS – ICGM – AIME – University of Montpellier, France), Thomas Schmidt (Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland), and J. Herranz (Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland).

About the Meeting
The ECS Conference on Electrochemical Energy Conversion & Storage with SOFC-XIV served as a major forum for the discussion of interdisciplinary research from around the world through a variety of formats, such as invited and keynote oral presentations, poster sessions, and exhibits. This was the first of a series of planned biennial conferences in Europe by ECS on electrochemical energy conversion/storage materials, concepts, and systems, with the intent to bring together scientists and engineers to discuss both fundamental advances and engineering innovations.

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The new process uses light to do photochemistry instead of the traditional method of using heat to do chemistry.
Image: Emory University

Scientists from Emory University are opening yet another door to renewable energy efforts. Their new way of performing light-driven reactions based on plasmon—the motion of free electrons that strongly absorb and scatter light—is said to be much more effective than previous processes.

“We’ve discovered a new and unexpected way to use plasmonic metal that holds potential for use in solar energy conversion,” says Tim Lian, professor of physical chemistry at Emory University and the lead author of the research. “We’ve shown that we can harvest the high energy electrons excited by light in plasmon and then use this energy to do chemistry.”

To get a better understanding of surface plasmonic, just think of how a cathedral’s stained glass windows absorb and shatter light.

Researchers involved in this study believe their plasmonic centered process could apply to efforts in electronics and renewable energy. Using plasmon could potentially make light-driven charge transfer for solar energy conversion much more efficient.

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The laboratory-created chemical garden exhibits battery-like properties that may have helped start life on Earth.
Image: Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech

Energy is everywhere. As long as there has been a universe, there has been energy. In fact, some researchers believe that Earth’s very first life forms got a little electrical energy boost from chemical seafloor gardens.

Of course this was only a theory, so scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have grown their on chemical gardens in-house. The have proven strong enough to power a lightbulb, suggesting that the first cell-like organisms may indeed have used seafloor, chimney-shaped structures to channel electricity.

“These chimneys can act like electrical wires on the seafloor,” said Laurie Barge of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We’re harnessing energy as the first life on Earth might have.”

These findings help researchers explore more definitive answers to the question of life on earth and how it all started. The idea of the seafloor chemical garden agrees with an already established scientific theory—alkaline vent hypothesis—that leans toward the idea that life started underwater due to warm, alkaline chimneys.

“Life doesn’t want to get electrocuted, but needs just the right amount of electricity,” said Michael Russell of Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This new experiment confirms what that amount of electricity is – just under a volt.”

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Researchers made a prediction two years ago that a one-atom thick, tin super material would soon be developed. They believed that this mesh material would yield amazing advances for materials science and be able to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency. Now, those same researchers are making good on their prediction with the announcement of the newly developed film called stanene.

Theoretically, potential uses of this material could range from circuit structures to transistors.

Cousin to graphene, this lattice of carbon atoms has similar qualities to a host of other materials, but scientists predict stanene to have a special kick that no other material has yet.

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Actress, comedian, and author Amy Poehler has put a lot of effort into empowering young girls in science for some time now. Her Smart Girls project took off in 2008, which serves as a place where future women can foster their curiosity and pursue opportunities in STEM. Now Poehler and her Smart Girls group are adding to the women in STEM conversation with their new series, “Experimenting with Megan Amram.”

Amram is a Harvard graduate, author, and comedian. The new web series serves as a perfect platform to continue what she already started in her book Science… for Her!. The parody science text is comedic in nature, but takes a hard look at the gender gap in STEM and offers up some pretty solid science as well.

As an added bonus, you can even get a step-by-step instructions on how to conduct Amram’s experiments.

PS: Head over to the ECS YouTube page to find more educational science videos.

There are more than 250 million cars and trucks on U.S. roads. From these vehicles, roughly 135 billion gallons of gasoline are consumed each year in the United States. In fact, 28 percent of energy used in the country is in the transportation sector.

While many may think that the majority of this consumption would come from planes or trains, personal cars and trucks actually consume 60 percent of all energy used here. Unfortunately, most of that energy is lost to heat and other inefficiencies within the vehicles, leaving only about 10 to 16 percent of a car’s fuel being used to actually drive and overcome road resistance.

However, the researchers at Virginia Tech may have a partial solution to this problem: harvesting energy from a car’s suspension.

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The cleaning of industrial wastewater is a persistent issue across the globe. If left untreated, these harmful waters could enter open watercourses, dispersing contaminants such as mercury and lead. Not only is this an immediate health risk, but it also threatens the entire ecosystem.

Modern wastewater treatment plants have been able to treat the water, but have not been very environmentally conscious. The typical plant produces CO₂ by burning fossil fuels for power and the general decomposition of the materials in the wastewater. Not to mention, these things require a lot of power. About 12 trillion gallons of wastewater gets treated each year in the United States along, consuming an alarmingly high 3 percent of the nation’s energy grid.

Researchers have already produced power from pee and made poop potable; so why not develop a new type of wastewater treatment device that significantly lessens the severity of CO₂ emissions and simultaneously captures greenhouse gases?

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The new hybrid sol-gel material provides an electrical energy storage capacity rivaling some batteries.
Image: John Toon/Georgia Tech

The future of electric vehicle and defibrillator technologies depend largely on new, innovative energy storage research and improving device power densities. With the high demand for more powerful, efficient energy devices, the researchers from Georgia Tech believe they may have developed what could be the answer to powering large-scale devices.

The team has developed a new capacitor dielectric material. This capacitor—developed from a hybrid silica sol-gel material and self-assembled monolayers of common fatty acid—has the potential to surpass some of today’s conventional batteries in the field of energy and power density.

If the researchers can scale up their current laboratory sample, the new capacitors will be able to provide large amounts of current quickly to large-scale applications.

This from Georgia Tech:

The new material is composed of a silica sol-gel thin film containing polar groups linked to the silicon atoms and a nanoscale self-assembled monolayer of an octylphosphonic acid, which provides insulating properties. The bilayer structure blocks the injection of electrons into the sol-gel material, providing low leakage current, high breakdown strength and high energy extraction efficiency.

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The new polymer is able to store energy at higher temperatures.
Image: Qi Li/Nature

Polymer dielectric materials have many beneficial properties when it comes to energy storage for advanced electronics and power systems. While the materials are highly flexible and have good chemical stability, their main drawback is their limitation of functionality in primarily low working temperatures. In turn, this limits the wider use of polymer dielectric materials for applications such as electric vehicles and underground oil exploration.

However, researchers from Pennsylvania State University have developed a flexible, high-temperature dielectric material from polymer nanocomposites that looks promising for the application of high-temperature electronics.

The researchers, including current ECS member Lei Chen, were able to stabilize dielectric properties by crosslinking polymer nanocomposites that contain boron nitride nanosheets. In testing, the energy density was increased by 400 percent while remaining stable at temperatures as high as 300° C.

With the nanocomposites having huge energy storage capabilities at high temperatures, a much broader application of organic materials in high temperatures electronics and energy storage can be explored.

PS: Interested in polymer research? Make sure to attend the 228th ECS Meeting and get the latest polymer science at our polymers symposia.