Notes from the Section Chairman

Pittsburgh is gradually evolving to be a hub of education, science and research. The Electrochemical Society bears great relevance to a number of upcoming challenges including energy generation and storage, corrosion, biochemical systems etc., and a number of local universities and companies are perform cutting edge research.

With that in mind, section could act as a forum for fruitful interaction and collaboration. We are reaching out to local members interested in participating and rejuvenating the Pittsburgh Section, which has been dormant for many years. We also aim to give information on local activities and events. These posts will highlight one research group and their work in electrochemical research and also provide an update of local activities.

Since this is the beginning of a new effort, we would like your feedback with regards to activities of interest. Please take the time to complete the survey and help the officers identify areas of interest. And let us know if there is any news you’d like to see in a future issue.

Thanks,
Cliff Walton
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If you haven’t embraced solar energy yet, it may be about time to do so. After all, it is cheaper than grid energy in 42 of the 50 largest cities in the United States.

According to the study “Going Solar in America: Ranking Solar’s Value in America’s Largest Cities,” a fully financed solar system costs less than residential grid energy purchased in over 80 percent of the largest U.S. cities. Additionally, 9.1 million single-family homeowners live in a place where their utility bill outpaces what solar would cost.

The falling cost of solar panels and solar fuel cells is largely driven by, in part, research into new materials and developments in the sciences. Check out a few interesting reads on solar energy from the ECS Digital Library:

• “Photobioelectrochemistry: Solar Energy Conversion and Biofuel Production with Photosynthetic Catalysts” (It’s open access!)
• “The Role of Energy Levels in Semiconductor-Electrolyte Solar Cells“
• “Photoelectrolysis and In Situ Storage of Solar Energy” (Throwback to 1989!)

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Find openings in your area via the ECS job board.

ECS’s job board keeps you up-to-date with the latest career opportunities in electrochemical and solid state science. Check out the latest openings that have been added to the board.

P.S. Employers can post open positions for free!

Research Consultant
Final Coat – Akron, Ohio
Cutting edge Research Laboratory looking for experienced (4-5 yrs.) electrochemist with a background in corrosion research to join our team. Located in Akron, Ohio. Corrosion Research will be focused on steel/zinc systems. The candidate will direct the corrosion research and be able to design experiments, specify equipment needed, perform data analysis and have an understanding of data acquisition and programming.

Post Doc
Arizona State University – Tempe, Arizona
Prof. Karl Sieradzki has an immediate opening in his group for a postdoctoral researcher in the general area of electrochemistry/corrosion. Applicants should have a PhD in chemistry, chemical engineering or materials science and possess extensive knowledge of electrochemistry and relevant materials characterization techniques such as SEM, XRD, etc. Additional experience in non-aqueous electrochemistry (organic solvents and/or ionic liquids) and C++ coding would be preferred but not required for this position.

Cancer is among the leading causes of mortality worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer related deaths were recorded in 2012. If no major breakthroughs are made in the field, that number is expected to rise by 70 percent over the next two decades. In honor of World Cancer Day, we’re taking a look at a few ways electrochemical and solid state science aids in the fight against cancer.

Electrochemical Biosensing for Cancer Detection
By taking biopsy slices for colon cancer, researchers were able to use electrochemical biosensors to distinguish between cancerous and normal epithelial tissues. This development helped promote rapid cancer detection by eliminating pretreatment and providing results obtained within minutes of biopsy removal. Read the full paper here.

Polymer Based Sensors to Diagnose Breast Cancer
There are many issues that mammography faces, including the uncomfortableness of the screening and exposure to radiation. In order to solve this issues, electrochemical scientists developed an Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) system. This radiation-less technique aims to enhance early detection capabilities by generating a 3-D map of the breast. Read the full paper here.

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“The unique and longer-term part of our OA plan is to “Free the Science™“: to provide all ECS content at no cost to anyone—no fees for authors, readers, and libraries.”

Published in the latest issue of Interface.

The models of scientific communication and publication—which have served us all so well for so long—are no longer fully meeting the spirit of the ECS mission, may not be financially viable, and are hurting the dissemination of the results of scientific research.

The future of Open Access (OA) can change not only scholarly publishing, but can change the nature of scientific communication itself. OA has the power to more “evenly distribute” the advantages currently given to those who can easily access the outputs of scientific research.

ECS has long been concerned with facilitating that access, and our mission has been to disseminate the content from within our technical domain, as broadly as possible, and with as few barriers as possible. To accomplish this, we have maintained a robust, high-quality, high-impact publishing program for over 100 years.

Several years ago, ECS started taking a serious look at the challenges facing us in fulfilling our mission, specifically with respect to our publishing program. The challenges—faced by others in publishing, to a greater or lesser degree—are many and have become increasingly sever.

When a commercial scientific publisher is taking a 35% net profit out of the system, compared with under 2% by ECS, something is not only wrong, but it is clear that some publishers will do anything and everything they can to keep maintaining that level of profit. For many, journal publishing has indeed become a business.

Read the rest.

Find openings in your area via the ECS job board.

ECS’s job board keeps you up-to-date with the latest career opportunities in electrochemical and solid state science. Check out the latest openings that have been added to the board.

P.S. Employers can post open positions for free!

Post Doc (NIR/EIS)
Irstea – Montpellier, France
This Post Doc is integrated to a binational project, NEXT. The goal of this project is to investigate the in-line and real-time use of novel holistic sludge descriptors to measure, monitor, model and predict sludge behaviour through sludge treatment processes and use this knowledge for the optimization of design and operation of treatment processes. It will lean on previous works developed by two Irstea teams (on the one hand on organic fluids characterisation based on electrical measurements and rheology and on the other hand on near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy on turbid fluids and soils).

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The aluminum-air battery has the potential to serve as a short-term power source for electric vehicles.
Image: Journal of The Electrochemical Society

A new long-life aluminum-air battery is set to resolve challenges in rechargeable energy storage technology, thanks to ECS member Ryohei Mori.

Mori’s development has yielded a new type of aluminum-air battery, which is rechargeable by refilling with either salt or fresh water.

The research is detailed in an open access article in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, where Mori explains how he modified the structure of the previous aluminum-air battery to ensure a longer battery life.

Theoretically, metal-air technology can have very high energy densities, which makes it a promising candidate for next-generation batteries that could enable such things as long-range battery-electric vehicles.

However, the long-standing barrier of anode corrosion and byproduct accumulation have halted these batteries from achieving their full potential. Dr. Mori’s recently published paper, “Addition of Ceramic Barriers to Aluminum-Air batteries to Suppress By-product Formation on Electrodes,” details how to combat this issue.

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Check out what’s trending in electrochemical and solid state technology! Read some of the most exciting and innovative papers that have been recently published in ECS’s journals.

The articles highlighted below are Open Access! Follow the links to get the full-text version.

“Modeling Volume Change due to Intercalation into Porous Electrodes”
Published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society
Lithium-ion batteries are electrochemical devices whose performance is influenced by transport processes, electrochemical phenomena, mechanical stresses, and structural deformations. Many mathematical models already describe the electrochemical performance of these devices. Some models go further and account for changes in porosity of the composite electrode. Read the rest.

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Each year ECS awards 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 five Summer Fellowship recipients for 2014. The Society thanks the Summer Fellowship Committee for their work in reviewing the applications and selecting five excellent recipients. Applications for the 2015 Summer Fellowships are due January 15, 2015.

Get more information here.

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Vortices of bound states in the continuum. The left panel shows five bound states in the continuum in a photonic crystal slab as bright spots. The right panel shows the polarization vector field in the same region as the left panel, revealing five vortices at the locations of the bound states in the continuum. These vortices are characterized with topological charges +1 or -1.
Credit: MIT

Research out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has led to a new understanding of how to halt protons, which could lead to miniature particle accelerators and improved data transmission.

Accordingly, this new work could help explain some basic physical mechanisms.

Last year, researchers from MIT succeeded in creating a material that could trap light and stop it in its tracks. Now, the same batch of researchers have conducted more studies in order to develop a more fundamental understand of the process, which reveals that this behavior is connected to a wide range of seemingly unrelated phenomena.

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