Amorphous Pt@dCu/CNT catalyst for methanol elextrooxidation

A multi-walled carbon nanotube-supported, Pt decorated nano-sized amorphous PdCu alloy cores (denoted as Pt@PdCu/CNT) catalyst with lower Pt loading is synthesized via a galvanic displacement reaction. The structure is examined using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The electrochemical activity of the Pt@PdCu/CNT catalyst is tested by cyclic voltammogrametry (CV) and compared to that of PtRu/CNT catalysts. The results show that amorphous Pt@PdCu/CNT catalyst exhibits better electro-catalytic performances for methanol oxidation than its crystalline counterpart.IS

A Convolutional Neural Network with Parallel Multi-Scale Spatial Pooling to Detect Temporal Changes in SAR Images

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection, it is quite challenging to exploit the changing information from the noisy difference image subject to the speckle. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale spatial pooling (MSSP) network to exploit the changed information from the noisy difference image. Being different from the traditional convolutional network with only mono-scale pooling kernels, in the proposed method, multi-scale pooling kernels are equipped in a convolutional network to exploit the spatial context information on changed regions from the difference image. Furthermore, to verify the generalization of the proposed method, we apply our proposed method to the cross-dataset bitemporal SAR image change detection, where the MSSP network (MSSP-Net) is trained on a dataset and then applied to an unknown testing dataset. We compare the proposed method with other state-of-arts and the comparisons are performed on four challenging datasets of bitemporal SAR images. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method obtains comparable results with S-PCA-Net on YR-A and YR-B dataset and outperforms other state-of-art methods, especially on the Sendai-A and Sendai-B datasets with more complex scenes. More important, MSSP-Net is more efficient than S-PCA-Net and convolutional neural networks (CNN) with less executing time in both training and testing phases

FDMA Point-to-Multi-Point Fibre Access System for Latency Sensitive Applications

We present a demo for a multiple uplink access system with real-time services. Several terminals transmit and are detected simultaneously through FDMA. The system can allow latency-sensitive and best-effort applications to share the network

FDMA in Point-to-Multipoint Fibre Access Systems for Non-Residential Applications

Optical access networks are seeing growing applications for use cases beyond residential, for example in campus and as Industry 4.0 intra-factory networks, which introduce different requirements in terms of bandwidth delivery and latency. We present an uplink access system with simultaneous transmission and detection of several users by means of frequency division multiplexing (FDM). We demonstrate a multiple uplink access system with differential binary phase shift keying (DBPSK) signals and coherent detection that targets a low and deterministic latency. We achieve receiver (Rx) sensitivities of -43.5dBm, -40dBm, and -34dBm at a pre forward error correction (FEC) bit error ratio (BER) of 10 -3 at 2.5 GBaud, 5 GBaud, and 8 GBaud respectively after 20km of fibre with coherent detection. Furthermore, we show the possibility of employing time-division multiplexing (TDM) within the frequency bands. We also present real-time services showing that the system can allow latency-sensitive and best-effort applications to share the network

Synthesis of carbon-supported PdSn–SnO2 nanoparticles with different degrees of interfacial contact and enhanced catalytic activities for formic acid oxidation

The conjunction of the PdSn alloy and SnO2 is of interest for improving catalytic activity in formic acid oxidation (FAO). Here, we report the synthesis of PdSn–SnO2 nanoparticles and a study of their catalytic FAO activity. Different degrees of interfacial contact between SnO2 and PdSn were obtained using two different stabilizers (sodium citrate and EDTA) during the reduction process in catalyst preparation. Compared to the PdSn alloy, PdSn–SnO2 supported on carbon black showed enhanced FAO catalytic activity due to the presence of SnO2 species. It was also found that interfacial contact between the PdSn alloy and the SnO2 phase has an impact on the activity towards CO oxidation and FAO.Web of Scienc

Nanoparticulate TiO2-promoted PtRu/C catalyst for methanol oxidation: TiO2 nanoparticles promoted PtRu/C catalyst for MOR

To improve the electrocatalytic properties of PtRu/C in methanol electrooxidation, nanoparticulate TiO2-promoted PtRu/C catalysts were prepared by directly mixing TiO2 nanoparticles with PtRu/C. Using cyclic voltammetry, it was found that the addition of 10 wt% TiO2 nanoparticles can effectively improve the electrocatalytic activity and stability of the catalyst during methanol electro-oxidation. The value of the apparent activation energy (Ea) for TiO2-PtRu/C was lower than that for pure PtRu/C at a potential range from 0.45 to 0.60 V. A synergistic effect between PtRu and TiO2 nanoparticles is likely to facilitate the removal of CO-like intermediates from the surface of PtRu catalyst and reduce the poisoning of the PtRu catalysts during methanol electrooxidation. Therefore, we conclude that the direct introduction of TiO2 nanoparticles into PtRu/ C catalysts offers an improved facile method to enhance the electrocatalytic performance of PtRu/C catalyst in methanol electrooxidation.Web of Scienc