batterydata/paper-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Although silicon is the most promising anode material for Li-ion batteries, large volume expansion during lithiation and delithiation is the main obstacle limiting the commercial application of silicon anodes. There are two ways to alleviate volume expansion and prevent further pulverization of a Si anode: fabrication of a rational nanostructure possessing void spaces and uniform distribution of the conducting sites, without a good balance effect in mitigating the limiting factors and enhancing battery performance. In this paper, we propose a novel nanostructure — a carbon-shell-constrained Si cluster (Si/C shell) with both adequate void space and good distribution of electrical contact sites to guarantee homogeneous lithiation in the initial cycle. Benefiting from the ability to maintain electrical conductivity of the outer carbon shell, even after cluster fragmentation, the Si/C shell synthesized from low-cost commercial Al-Si alloy spheres can deliver 0.03% capacity loss from 100th to 1000th cycles at a current density of 1 A g−1. The Si/C shell sample with the dual functional structure mentioned above can also maintain its own nanostructure during cycling and deliver excellent rate performance. It is a concise and scalable strategy which can simplify the preparation of other alloy anode materials for Li-ion batteries.
The technology of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) has now reached the test-phase, and engineering development and optimization are vital in order to achieve to the next step of the evolution, i.e. the realization of commercial units. This paper highlights the most important technological progresses in the areas of (i) water and thermal management, (ii) scale-up from single cells to cell stacks, (iii) bipolar plates and flow fields, and (iv) fuel processing. Modeling is another aspect of the technological development, since modeling studies have significantly contributed to the understanding of the physico-chemical phenomena occurring in a fuel cell, and also have provided a valuable tool for the optimization of structure, geometry and operating conditions of fuel cells and stacks. The ‘quantum jumps’ in this field are reviewed, starting from the studies at the electrode level up to the stack and system size, with particular emphasis on (i) the ‘cluster–network’ model of perfluorosulfonic membranes, and the percolative dependence of the membrane proton conductivity on its water content, (ii) the models of charge and mass transport coupled to electrochemical reaction in the electrodes, and (iii) the models of water transport trough the membrane, which have been usefully applied for the optimization of water management of PEMFCs. The evolution of PEMFC applications is discussed as well, starting from the NASA’s Gemini Space Flights to the latest developments of fuel cell vehicles, including the evolutions in the areas of portable power sources and residential and building applications.
LiY0.1V3O8 compound was successfully prepared by using a simple, rapid and easily scaled up method, i.e. the rheological phase reaction method. The microstructural characteristics of LiY0.1V3O8 materials were examined by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Compared with LiV3O8 compound, the LiY0.1V3O8 shows expanded crystal lattices, and the expansion is more significant along the c-axis. The electrochemical properties of the as-synthesized LiY0.1V3O8 compounds were investigated. It was found that the LiY0.1V3O8 electrodes exhibited better reversibility and higher capacities than LiV3O8 electrodes. The reasons for the improved electrochemical performance of the LiY0.1V3O8 electrodes are also discussed.
Gel polymer electrolytes consisted of poly(alkylene oxide) (PAO), LiBF4 or LiClO4, and aprotic solvents (γ-butyrolactone (GBL) and/or ethylene carbonate (EC)) were prepared and the conductivity was measured. The conductivity was very high and similar to that of the organic liquid electrolytes. The performance of Li|gel polymer electrolyte|LiCoO2 cell was measured and compared to that of the cell with the liquid electrolyte corresponded. The cell with the gel electrolyte showed a decrease of capacity at high-rate discharge and low temperature owing to concentration polarization.
The main objectives of this prospective study were to (1) assess memory and intelligence outcome following surgery for intractable temporal lobe epilepsy, (2) correlate this with seizure outcome and side of surgery, and (3) perform (1) and (2) using an indigenously developed battery customized to the Indian population. Prior to use in our epilepsy surgery program, the test–retest and interexaminer variance reliability of this battery had been established in both normal and cognitively compromised populations. The memory scores were overall rather than material-specific. The battery was administered to right-handed adults undergoing surgery for intractable temporal lobe epilepsy without any evidence of opposite temporal lobe abnormality, both presurgery and postsurgery at a mean follow-up of 8 months. Twenty-five consecutive patients were included; 13 underwent right and 12 underwent left temporal surgery. Seizure outcome was assessed using Engel’s classification. Among 13 patients who underwent right temporal surgery, although 4 patients with poor seizure outcome had insignificant changes in scores, 7 of 9 patients with good seizure outcome exhibited considerable (>20% over preoperative) improvement in their memory and intelligence scores. Statistical analysis using Student’s t test and the Mann–Whitney test revealed that the patients who underwent right temporal surgery with good seizure outcome had significant improvement in both memory (P =0.007) and intelligence (P =0.043) scores compared with those with poor seizure outcome. In contrast, patients who underwent left temporal surgery had no significant change in cognitive scores irrespective of seizure outcome. Cognitive improvement seems to occur in patients with good seizure outcome following nondominant temporal lobe surgery for intractable epilepsy with no evidence of pathology in the opposite temporal lobe. The same finding was not observed in patients undergoing left temporal surgery.
As electronic devices continue to become smaller, their energy sources (i.e., batteries) also need to be smaller. Typically, energy densities of batteries decrease as the battery size decreases due to the relative increase of parasitic weight such as packaging materials. In addition, the sealing methods in conventional batteries are difficult to apply to microbatteries. In this work, we developed a facile sealing method for microbatteries. The method employs a dual-sealing concept: a first rubber barrier temporally confines the organic electrolytes and a second adhesive barrier forms a hermetic seal with the battery case. With this innovative sealing approach, excellent shelf life and operation life of the batteries have been demonstrated. A minimal amount of packing materials is employed resulting in high energy densities.
Adolescence is a time of considerable social, cognitive, and physiological development. It reflects a period of heightened risk for the onset of mental health problems, as well as heightened opportunity for flourishing and resilience. The CogBIAS Longitudinal Study (CogBIAS-L-S) aims to investigate psychological development during adolescence.
A granular aluminum anode was investigated for use in an alkaline aluminum/hydrogen peroxide fuel cell. The fuel cell utilizes granules of aluminum (8–12mm in diameter) as an anode, potassium hydroxide (KOH) as an anolyte and hydrogen peroxide as a catholyte. Granular anodes have a significantly higher surface area than planar surfaces, thereby resulting in higher utilization of the anode material. Polarization experiments were performed as well as closed circuit power production experiments. KOH concentrations were varied in the experiments. Polarization experiments achieved a current density of 10.02mA/cm2 using 2M KOH and granular aluminum with a surface area of 205.6cm2. Power production experiments sustained a current density of 0.05mA/cm2 using 1.5M KOH and granular aluminum with a surface area of 59.8cm2. Results indicate that granular metal anodes have potential for use in high energy density fuel cells.
The autism spectrum has become a highly studied topic, perhaps the most researched of all developmental disorders. A host of related topics are being studied, with one of the most common being comorbidity of autism with other conditions such as epilepsy, sleep, and anxiety disorders. One of the most prevalent of these comorbid conditions is attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD). A considerable amount of research has appeared on this topic with respect to symptom expression, prevalence of overlap, type of symptom overlap, and the effect of these two conditions co-occurrence on other symptoms and disorders. Given the substantial data base that has accrued, review and synthesis of these data are in order. This is the purpose of the present manuscript.
A staircase galvanostatic intermittent titration technique (SC-GITT) is introduced and exemplarily examined using the well-known half-cell reaction, LiCoO2 | Li. SC-GITT expands the common GITT and complements the number of accessible kinetic parameters by the ohmic resistance, the exchange current density and the charge transfer coefficient. In contrast to conventional GITT, the magnitude of the applied current is rapidly varied in a staircase like manner previously to the actual titration step. The overpotentials obtained within the staircase regime are fitted to a modified Butler–Volmer equation to determine the kinetic parameters. In the case of LiCoO2, the results reveal a significant lithium concentration dependence of the charge transfer kinetics and the ohmic resistance. The proposed experimental technique appears to be well suited for the investigation of electrochemical kinetics for all kinds of insertion electrodes.
The new Varta PoLiFlex™ polymer technology exhibits beside a high rate performance and a very low swelling behaviour under high-temperature storage an excellent safety performance due to the combination of a shut down separator, electrolyte additive and a proprietary treated cathode material.
Glutamate and N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) dysfunction is strongly implicated in the pathophysiology of mood and anxiety disorders. Treatment with NMDAR antagonists has antidepressant efficacy in treatment-resistant depressives. In preclinical rodent models, NMDAR antagonist administration reduces anxiety- and stress-related behaviors in concert with increases in prefrontal cortical (PFC) dendritic spinogenesis and synaptic proteins. While these effects have been attributed to actions at the NMDAR GluN2B subunit, the precise role of cortical GluN2B in mediating emotional behaviors and stress-responsivity is not fully understood. Here, we employed a novel mutant model in which the GluN2B subunit is postnatally deleted in principal neurons in the cortex and the dorsal CA1 subregion of the hippocampus. GluN2BKO mice were phenotyped on a battery of tests for anxiety-related (light/dark exploration, stress-induced hyperthermia) and antidepressant-sensitive (sucrose preference, novelty-induced hypophagia, single-trial forced swim) behaviors. A novel repeated inescapable forced swim paradigm (riFS) was developed to assess behavioral responses to repeated stress in the GluN2BKO mice. For comparison, non-mutant C57BL/6J mice were tested for single-trial forced swim behavior after systemic Ro 25-6981 treatment and for riFS behavior after lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. riFS-induced alterations in corticolimbic GluN2B expression were also examined in C57BL/6J mice. We found that GluN2BKO mice reduced “despair-like” behavior in the riFS procedure, as compared to GluN2BFLOX controls. By contrast, GluN2BKO mice showed minimal alterations on anxiety-like or antidepressant-sensitive assays, including the single-trial forced swim test. In C57BL/6J mice, induction of “despair-like” responses in the riFS test was attenuated by vmPFC lesions, and was associated with changes in limbic GluN2B expression. Collectively, these data suggest that cortical GluN2B plays a major role in modulating adaptive responses to stress. Current findings provide further support for GluN2B as a key mechanism underlying stress responsivity, and a novel pharmacotherapeutic target for stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders.
Previous research on social inequalities relied primarily on objective indicators. According to recent studies, however, subjective indicators that reflect a person’s perceptions and evaluations of inequalities are also relevant. Such evaluations depend on an individual’s normative orientation, so respective attitudes toward distributive justice need to be accounted for appropriately. This article introduces a short scale for measuring such order-related justice attitudes. The introduced Basic Social Justice Orientations (BSJO) scale comprises current insights into the empirical justice research and measures individuals’ attitudes toward the following four basic distributive principles: equality, need, equity, and entitlement. The BSJO scale has four dimensions that measure support for these four justice principles on the basis of eight items. We assess the quality of the scale using data from three general population surveys conducted in Germany: the first wave of the panel “Legitimation of Inequality Over the Life Span” (LINOS-1), the Innovation Sample of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-IS 2012), and the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS 2014). The scale was found to be a valid instrument that can be used to measure order-related justice attitudes toward distributive justice. The BSJO scale is a short and therefore time-efficient instrument that can be implemented in general population surveys.
The present report describes the results of the electrochemical tests performed on polyethyleneoxide-based polymer electrolyte thin films industrially manufactured by blown-extrusion. The polymer electrolyte composition was PEO20 LiCF3SO3: 16.7% γLiAlO2. The polymer electrolyte film was tested to evaluate the ionic conductivity as well as the interfacial properties with lithium metal anodes. The work was developed within the advanced lithium polymer electrolyte (ALPE) project, an Italian project devoted to the realization of lithium polymer batteries for electric vehicle applications, in collaboration with Union Carbide.
A 3D pore-scale transport resolved model is used to study the performance characteristics of a vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) with various electrode morphologies under different operating conditions. Three electrode structures are reconstructed from X-ray computed tomography (XCT) images of porous carbon felt electrode materials. The local vanadium concentration, overpotential, current density and overall cell voltage for the positive half cell are examined. The results indicate that the cell voltage increases with increasing electrolyte flow rate due to decreasing concentration gradients of vanadium species within the porous electrode. However, the marginal gain in cell voltage diminishes once the concentration field approaches uniformity under convection-dominated mass transport conditions at sufficiently high electrolyte flow rates. The model also predicts that electrode structures with low porosity (high surface area) result in more uniform and lower absolute current density and overpotential fields at the expense of increased pressure drop. Finally, poor cell performance is observed for simulations operated at low electrolyte flow rates and low states of charge due to the fuel starvation (i.e., insufficient amount of reactant in the cell).
Since its foundation in the mid-nineteenth century, the University of Toronto has accumulated a substantial number of historically-significant scientific objects. As Canada’s largest research university, much of this material is of national significance. Despite numerous attempts since the late 1970s to establish a universal policy for the preservation and safeguarding of scientific apparatus, the survival of Toronto’s scientific material heritage has depended partly on the initiatives of dedicated individuals, partly on luck. The following examination seeks a comprehensive history of the material culture of science at the University, focussing on scientific instrumentation and natural history collections. It examines the circumstances under which some material survives and traces efforts to develop a curated collection, concluding with some recent progress in acquiring storage and developing an online catalogue. It argues that early university science museums formed an important venue through which the University fulfilled its public function of studying the frontier and assisting the expansion of the colonies. The display and interpretation of scientific material culture had an important impact on the University’s early history.
Lithium-ion batteries have been widely used in many fields. The state-of-health is necessary and important for battery performance evaluation and lifetime prediction. A reliable state-of-health estimation is essential to help batteries work in a safe and suitable condition. In this paper, a novel state-of-health estimation approach is proposed for lithium-ion batteries based on statistical knowledge. An improved battery model, which combines the open-circuit-voltage modeling and the Thevenin equivalent circuit model, is proposed to improve the model accuracy and study the relation between internal parameters and states of the battery. The joint extended Kalman filter-recursive-least squares algorithm is employed to estimate battery state-of-charge and identify the model parameters and open-circuit-voltage simultaneously. Then a particle swarm optimization-least square support vector regression approach is employed to give a reliable state-of-health estimation result with high accuracy and good generalization ability, where the particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to improve the algorithm ability of global optimization. In order to verify the accuracy of the proposed method, static and dynamic current profile tests are carried out on lithium iron phosphate batteries in different aging levels. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can present suitability for state-of-health estimation with high accuracy.
Although microgrids have been researched for over a decade and recognized for their multitude of benefits to improve power reliability, security, sustainability, and decrease power costs for the consumer, they have still not reached rapid commercial growth. The main aim of this research is to identify the common barriers and ultimate success factors to implementing a microgrid in the real world. We found that microgrids vary significantly depending on location, components, and optimization goals, which cause them to experience different types of challenges and barriers. However, the most common barriers were identified and grouped into four categories: technical, regulatory, financial, and stakeholder, based on the literature and overlying patterns recognized amongst the thirteen case studies. The most common technical barriers include problems with technology components, dual-mode switching from grid-connected to island mode, power quality and control, and protection issues. There is extensive research on how to overcome these issues, so technical solutions are becoming available yet case specific. Regulatory barriers exist due to interconnection rules with the main grid and the prohibition of bi-directional power flow and local power trading between microgrid and the main network. The latter issue is the barrier experienced most often and has only recently been addressed, so solutions need further research. The main financial barrier is still the burden of high investment and replacement costs of the microgrid. This can be resolved with proper market support in the short term and might naturally resolve itself through learning over the long run. Lastly, stakeholder barriers include issues with conflicting self-interest and trust, and having the expertise to manage operations. These stakeholder barriers are not yet addressed in the literature and need to be further researched.
In this work, in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) technique has been applied to investigate the structural and phase evolutions of lead selenide (PbSe) nanocrystals loaded on reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanosheets. An all-solid-state nano lithium battery composed of a single PbSe/rGO sheet cathode, Li2O electrolyte and Li anode has been fabricated to real time monitor the electrochemical lithiation/de-lithiation process of PbSe. It is found that few-layered rGO is a suitable support for PbSe during the in situ TEM observation due to its large surface area and good Li ion and electron conductivity. Based on the in situ characterization, a lithiation/de-lithiation mechanism of PbSe has been proposed. In situ characterization results are correlated with the electrochemical performance of PbSe/rGO. The role that rGO plays in modifying the electrochemical performance of PbSe has also been clarified by the in situ TEM characterization.
Abstract Fuel-efficient, low-emission powertrains and alternative, low-carbon fuels for road transport, particularly advanced biofuels, electricity, and hydrogen are essential to mitigating global climate change, urban air pollution, and energy security issues. Several high-profile comparative assessments of these technologies have been conducted over the last 2decades to inform policymakers and other stakeholders on which to support. The studies have generated a tremendous amount of knowledge and greatly improved our understanding of the relative roles of the different technologies. They show that all technologies are potentially required and support to all of them should therefore be granted. Sustainable, cost-competitive bioethanol in particular has a potentially important role to play in the short to medium term. Moreover, bioethanol and batteries should not be seen as antagonistic as they can work together in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. In the long term, if internal combustion engines are phased out, sustainable biomass production routes to bioethanol can continue to be exploited for the production of bio-hydrogen for fuel cell powertrains.
In this work, a novel 3D nanocomposite is presented, which is consisted of poly(N-acetylaniline) (PAANI)/multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) nanorods (in which the inner layer was comprised of MWNTs and the outer layer was PAANI, forming a core-shell structure) and the decorated Pt nanoparticles. Electrochemical techniques (such as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS)), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) are used to characterize the nanocomposite. The resulting Pt/PAANI/MWNTs nanocomposite can be served as a higher efficient catalyst for the electrochemical oxidation of formaldehyde at 0.41V with the catalytic current of 0.73mA, which was accompanied with about 45mV potential negative shifts and two-fold increase in peak current comparison to the Pt/PAANI. These results reveal that the Pt/PAANI/MWNTs nanocomposite film is quite promising in the fuel cell applications.