76 research outputs found
A Carbon Corrosion Model to Evaluate the Effect of Steady State and Transient Operation of a Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell
A carbon corrosion model is developed based on the formation of surface
oxides on carbon and platinum of the polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell
electrode. The model predicts the rate of carbon corrosion under potential hold
and potential cycling conditions. The model includes the interaction of carbon
surface oxides with transient species like OH radicals to explain observed
carbon corrosion trends under normal PEM fuel cell operating conditions. The
model prediction agrees qualitatively with the experimental data supporting the
hypothesis that the interplay of surface oxide formation on carbon and platinum
is the primary driver of carbon corrosion
Injection of photoelectrons into dense argon gas
The injection of photoelectrons in a gaseous or liquid sample is a widespread
technique to produce a cold plasma in a weakly--ionized system in order to
study the transport properties of electrons in a dense gas or liquid. We report
here the experimental results of photoelectron injection into dense argon gas
at the temperatureT=142.6 K as a function of the externally applied electric
field and gas density. We show that the experimental data can be interpreted in
terms of the so called Young-Bradbury model only if multiple scattering effects
due to the dense environment are taken into account when computing the
scattering properties and the energetics of the electrons.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, figure nr. 10 has been redrawn, to be submitted
to Plasma Sources Science and Technolog
Current-induced magnetic superstructures in exchange-spring devices
We investigate the potential to use a magneto-thermo-electric instability
that may be induced in a mesoscopic magnetic multi-layer (F/f/F) to create and
control magnetic superstructures. In the studied multilayer two strongly
ferromagnetic layers (F) are coupled through a weakly ferromagnetic spacer (f)
by an "exchange spring" with a temperature dependent "spring constant" that can
be varied by Joule heating caused by an electrical dc current. We show that in
the current-in-plane (CIP) configuration a distribution of the magnetization,
which is homogeneous in the direction of the current flow, is unstable in the
presence of an external magnetic field if the length L of the sample in this
direction exceeds some critical value Lc ~ 10 \mu m. This spatial instability
results in the spontaneous formation of a moving domain of magnetization
directions, the length of which can be controlled by the bias voltage in the
limit L >> Lc. Furthermore, we show that in such a situation the
current-voltage characteristics has a plateau with hysteresis loops at its ends
and demonstrate that if biased in the plateau region the studied device
functions as an exponentially precise current stabilizer.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure
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