37 research outputs found
3D PrintingâEnabled Design and Manufacturing Strategies for Batteries: A Review
Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have significantly impacted the daily lives, finding
broad applications in various industries such as consumer electronics, electric
vehicles, medical devices, aerospace, and power tools. However, they still face
issues (i.e., safety due to dendrite propagation, manufacturing cost, random
porosities, and basic & planar geometries) that hinder their widespread
applications as the demand for LIBs rapidly increases in all sectors due to
their high energy and power density values compared to other batteries.
Additive manufacturing (AM) is a promising technique for creating precise
and programmable structures in energy storage devices. This review first
summarizes light, filament, powder, and jetting-based 3D printing methods
with the status on current trends and limitations for each AM technology. The
paper also delves into 3D printing-enabled electrodes (both anodes and
cathodes) and solid-state electrolytes for LIBs, emphasizing the current
state-of-the-art materials, manufacturing methods, and
properties/performance. Additionally, the current challenges in the AM for
electrochemical energy storage (EES) applications, including limited
materials, low processing precision, codesign/comanufacturing concepts for
complete battery printing, machine learning (ML)/artificial intelligence (AI) for
processing optimization and data analysis, environmental risks, and the
potential of 4D printing in advanced battery applications, are also presented
Diva: A Declarative and Reactive Language for In-Situ Visualization
The use of adaptive workflow management for in situ visualization and
analysis has been a growing trend in large-scale scientific simulations.
However, coordinating adaptive workflows with traditional procedural
programming languages can be difficult because system flow is determined by
unpredictable scientific phenomena, which often appear in an unknown order and
can evade event handling. This makes the implementation of adaptive workflows
tedious and error-prone. Recently, reactive and declarative programming
paradigms have been recognized as well-suited solutions to similar problems in
other domains. However, there is a dearth of research on adapting these
approaches to in situ visualization and analysis. With this paper, we present a
language design and runtime system for developing adaptive systems through a
declarative and reactive programming paradigm. We illustrate how an adaptive
workflow programming system is implemented using our approach and demonstrate
it with a use case from a combustion simulation.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, 6 listings, 1 table, to be published in LDAV
2020. The article has gone through 2 major revisions: Emphasized
contributions, features and examples. Addressed connections between DIVA and
FRP. In sec. 3, we fixed a design flaw and addressed it in sec. 3.3-3.4.
Re-designed sec. 5 with a more concrete example and benchmark results.
Simplified the syntax of DIV
People in transitions: Energy citizenship, prosumerism and social movements in Europe
Active energy citizens are leading energy transitions, co-producing new cultures, practices and structures of production and consumption. This article aims to understand if prosumerism â the collective participation of prosumers in energy projects with social, economic and environmental benefits to society â can be referred to as a social movement. The article draws on a review of Social Movements Theory and applies thematic analysis to characterize 46 prosumer initiatives in Europe. The collective identities, socio-political opponents, knowledge-making activities, collective learning, and collective action aspects of these prosumers are described. The results show that prosumer initiatives converge towards a transformative social movement. This movement upholds decentralized renewable energy production and consumption, and presents itself as a socially inclusive, transparent and participatory energy model, replicable across the globe, in what can be described as a collective action towards a decentralized democratic energy model. The discussion highlights relationships between prosumerism and framings such as energy justice (including energy poverty and gender issues), energy democracy, climate change action and anti-nuclear movements, to reach a conclusion considering the relevance of calling prosumerism a social movement, while opening up some avenues for future research.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Digital Innovations for a Circular Plastic Economy in Africa
Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century that requires innovative and varied solutions. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder perspectives exploring challenges and opportunities for utilising digital innovations to manage and accelerate the transition to a circular plastic economy (CPE).
This book is organised into three sections bringing together discussion of environmental conditions, operational dimensions and country case studies of digital transformation towards the circular plastic economy. It explores the environment for digitisation in the circular economy, bringing together perspectives from practitioners in academia, innovation, policy, civil society and government agencies. The book also highlights specific country case studies in relation to the development and implementation of different innovative ideas to drive the circular plastic economy across the three sub-Saharan African regions. Finally, the book interrogates the policy dimensions and practitioner perspectives towards a digitally enabled circular plastic economy.
Written for a wide range of readers across academia, policy and practice, including researchers, students, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), digital entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies, policymakers and public officials, this book offers unique insights into complex, multilayered issues relating to the production and management of plastic waste and highlights how digital innovations can drive the transition to the circular plastic economy in Africa.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license
Development and implementation of the EU grand strategies: sociological, policy, and regional considerations of Agenda 2030
This book addresses the challenging and exciting issues of the implementation of the European Unionâs grand strategies, with a particular interest in the implementation of the current Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals. It provides insight into the impact of this strategic process on some of the current global issues relevant to the European Union, such as the European and global energy market, food supplies, industrial components etc. Some of the challenges have such a strong short-term impact, that already accepted strategic priorities and decisions are being questioned and re-examined. This is a particularly exciting subject, both as a research topic and as a policy issue
Citizen Science: Reducing Risk and Building Resilience to Natural Hazards
Natural hazards are becoming increasingly frequent within the context of climate changeâmaking reducing risk and building resilience against these hazards more crucial than ever. An emerging shift has been noted from broad-scale, top-down risk and resilience assessments toward more participatory, community-based, bottom-up approaches. Arguably, non-scientist local stakeholders have always played an important role in risk knowledge management and resilience building. Rapidly developing information and communication technologies such as the Internet, smartphones, and social media have already demonstrated their sizeable potential to make knowledge creation more multidirectional, decentralized, diverse, and inclusive (Paul et al., 2018). Combined with technologies for robust and low-cost sensor networks, various citizen science approaches have emerged recently (e.g., Haklay, 2012; Paul et al., 2018) as a promising direction in the provision of extensive, real-time information for risk management (as well as improving data provision in data-scarce regions). It can serve as a means of educating and empowering communities and stakeholders that are bypassed by more traditional knowledge generation processes.
This Research Topic compiles 13 contributions that interrogate the manifold ways in which citizen science has been interpreted to reduce risk against hazards that are (i) water-related (i.e., floods, hurricanes, drought, landslides); (ii) deep-earth-related (i.e., earthquakes and volcanoes); and (iii) responding to global environmental change such as sea-level rise. We have sought to analyse the particular failures and successes of natural hazards-related citizen science projects: the objective is to obtain a clearer understanding of âbest practiceâ in a citizen science context
Mobile Diagnosis 2.0
Mobile sensing and diagnostic capabilities are becoming extremely important for a wide range of emerging applications and fields spanning mobile health, telemedicine, point-of-care diagnostics, global health, field medicine, democratization of sensing and diagnostic tools, environmental monitoring, and citizen science, among many others. The importance of low-cost mobile technologies has been underlined during this current COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for applications such as the detection of pathogens, including bacteria and viruses, as well as for prediction and management of different diseases and disorders. This book focuses on some of these application areas and provides a timely summary of cutting-edge results and emerging technologies in these interdisciplinary fields
University of Maine Bulletin, 1997-1998 Undergraduate Catalog, part 2
The second part (of two) of the University of Maine catalog for the 1997-98 academic year includes information on university-wide programs, interdisciplinary studies, course descriptions, contacts for correspondence with the university, a list of the University of Maine System Board of Trustees, professors / faculty members, alumni association representatives, award recipients, and an index
Nanostructured thin films for solid oxide fuel cells
The goals of this work were to synthesize high performance perovskite based thin film
solid oxide fuel cell (TF-SOFC) cathodes by pulsed laser deposition (PLD), to study the
structural, electrical and electrochemical properties of these cathodes and to establish
structure-property relations for these cathodes in order to further improve their properties
and design new structures.
Nanostructured cathode thin films with vertically-aligned nanopores (VANP) were
processed using PLD. These VANP structures enhance the oxygen-gas phase diffusivity,
thus improve the overall TF-SOFC performance. La0.5Sr0.5CoO3 (LSCO) and
La0.4Sr0.6Co0.8Fe0.2O3 (LSCFO) were deposited on various substrates (YSZ, Si and
pressed Ce0.9Gd0.1O1.95 (CGO) disks). Microstructures and properties of the
nanostructured cathodes were characterized by transmission electron microscope (TEM),
high resolution TEM (HRTEM), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and
electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements. A thin layer of vertically-aligned nanocomposite (VAN) structure was deposited in
between the CGO electrolyte and the thin film LSCO cathode layer for TF-SOFCs. The
VAN structure consists of the electrolyte and the cathode materials in the composition of
(CGO) 0.5 (LSCO) 0.5. The self-assembled VAN nanostructures contain highly ordered
alternating vertical columns formed through a one-step thin film deposition using a PLD
technique. These VAN structures significantly increase the interface area between the
electrolyte and the cathode as well as the area of active triple phase boundary (TPB),
thus improving the overall TF-SOFC performance at low temperatures, as low as 400oC,
demonstrated by EIS measurements. In addition, the binary VAN interlayer could act as
the transition layer that improves the adhesion and relieves the thermal stress and lattice
strain between the cathode and the electrolyte.
The microstructural properties and growth mechanisms of CGO thin film prepared by
PLD technique were investigated. Thin film CGO electrolytes with different grain sizes
and crystal structures were prepared on single crystal YSZ substrates under different
deposition conditions. The effect of the deposition conditions such as substrate
temperature and laser ablation energy on the microstructural properties of these films are
examined using XRD, TEM, SEM, and optical microscope. CGO thin film deposited
above 500 ÂșC starts to show epitaxial growth on YSZ substrates. The present study
suggests that substrate temperature significantly influences the microstructure of the
films especially film grain size