Enhanced Solar‐to‐Hydrogen Generation with Broadband Epsilon‐Near‐Zero Nanostructured Photocatalysts

The direct conversion of solar energy into fuels or feedstock is an attractive approach to address increasing demand of renewable energy sources. Photocatalytic systems relying on the direct photoexcitation of metals have been explored to this end, a strategy that exploits the decay of plasmonic resonances into hot carriers. An efficient hot carrier generation and collection requires, ideally, their generation to be enclosed within few tens of nanometers at the metal interface, but it is challenging to achieve this across the broadband solar spectrum. Here the authors demonstrate a new photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution based on metal epsilon‐near‐zero metamaterials. The authors have designed these to achieve broadband strong light confinement at the metal interface across the entire solar spectrum. Using electron energy loss spectroscopy, the authors prove that hot carriers are generated in a broadband fashion within 10 nm in this system. The resulting photocatalyst achieves a hydrogen production rate of 9.5 µmol h^?1 cm^?2 that exceeds, by a factor of 3.2, that of the best previously reported plasmonic‐based photocatalysts for the dissociation of H₂ with 50 h stable operation.     

Hydration-Effect-Promoting Ni–Fe Oxyhydroxide Catalysts for Neutral Water Oxidation

Oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts that function efficiently in pH-neutral electrolyte are of interest for biohybrid fuel and chemical production. The low concentration of reactant in neutral electrolyte mandates that OER catalysts provide both the water adsorption and dissociation steps. Here it is shown, using density functional theory simulations, that the addition of hydrated metal cations into a Ni–Fe framework contributes water adsorption functionality proximate to the active sites. Hydration-effect-promoting (HEP) metal cations such as Mg²⁺ and hydration-effect-limiting Ba²⁺ into Ni–Fe frameworks using a room-temperature sol–gel process are incorporated. The Ni–Fe–Mg catalysts exhibit an overpotential of 310 mV at 10 mA cm⁻² in pH-neutral electrolytes and thus outperform iridium oxide (IrO₂) electrocatalyst by a margin of 40 mV. The catalysts are stable over 900 h of continuous operation. Experimental studies and computational simulations reveal that HEP catalysts favor the molecular adsorption of water and its dissociation in pH-neutral electrolyte, indicating a strategy to enhance OER catalytic activity.     

Finite‐Time Guaranteed Cost Control of Caputo Fractional‐Order Neural Networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of finite‐time guaranteed cost control of uncertain fractional‐order neural networks. Firstly, a new cost function is defined. Then, by using linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) approach, some new sufficient conditions for the design of a state feedback controller which makes the closed‐loop systems finite‐time stable and guarantees an adequate cost level of performance are derived. These conditions are in the form of linear matrix inequalities, which therefore can be efficiently solved by using existing convex algorithms. Finally, two numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

A 2D quadrangular pyramid photoelectric autocollimator with extended angle measurement range

A photoelectric autocollimator with high accuracy and extended measurement range based on the quadrangular pyramid is proposed, and the corresponding algorithms are also deduced. A new image processing algorithm has been proposed to improve the accuracy, and the corresponding errors are also estimated, the error does not exceed half a pixel when the distance between the marks more than two radii. The experimental results have verified that the measurement range of the proposed two-dimensional (2D) quadrangular pyramid photoelectric autocollimator can be increased times than that of the flat mirror photoelectric autocollimator from 10′ to 15′. The accuracy is better than 1″ when the deflection is less than 15′.     

Low temperature sintering of lead–free (Bi<Subscript>1/2</Subscript>Na<Subscript>1/2</Subscript>)TiO<Subscript>3</Subscript>-SrTiO<Subscript>3</Subscript>-BiFeO<Subscript>3</Subscript> piezoelectric ceramics by adding excess CuO

This study examined the microstructures, crystal structures, and electrical properties of 0.01 mol CuO–added (1–x)(Bi_1/2Na_1/2)TiO₃–xSrTiO₃–2BiFeO₃ (BNST100x–2BF, x?=?0.20 ~ 0.28) ceramics synthesized at two different sintering temperatures. The sintering temperature of the BNST100x–2BF ceramics could be decreased from 1175 °C to 1000 °C by adding a 0.01 mol CuO excess. Low–temperature sintering led to a decrease in average grain size. The dielectrics, polarization hysteresis (P–E), switching current, and electric–field induced strain (S–E) curves changed with increasing SrTiO₃ content and decreasing sintering temperature. Interestingly, the highest reduction ratio of d₃₃^* was calculated to be somewhere in between the high–temperature sintered and low–temperature sintered BNST26–2BF ceramics. These results were attributed to the difference in the stabilized relaxor state and closely related to the electric field–induced reversible phase transition from the relaxor and ferroelectrics.     

Study on the preparation of ordered mesoporous carbon-based catalyst from waste microalgal biomass for the synthesis of biokerosene

Investigation on preparation of novel ordered mesoporous carbon-based catalyst (MCC catalyst) containing super-acid sites from waste microalgal biomass was established. The waste microalgal biomass was partially carbonized at 400 °C for 2 h obtaining biochar; then the obtained biochar was introduced to a sulfonation process using concentrated sulfuric acid. The sulfonation was established at 150 °C for 15 h producing sulfonated biochar. The MCC catalyst was prepared through condensation–evaporation method in an alkaline media containing cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) as structure directing agent. The parameters of the condensation including time of evaporating and CTAB content were investigated while fixing temperature at 90 °C during the process. A special hydrothermal treatment was also applied to the preparation of the MCC catalyst in order to expand its mesopores for more convenient with large molecule diffusion. The catalyst activity was well demonstrated by converting linseed oil to biokerosene which could be used as biokerosene—component for blending with aviation fuels. The MCC catalysts were characterized by X-ray diffraction, infrared spectroscopy, energy dispersive X-ray, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, nitrogen adsorption–desorption method and ammonia-temperature programmed desorption techniques. The biokerosene composition was determined by gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy method.     

Actor-oriented directional anycast routing in wireless sensor and actor networks with smart antennas

Current routing protocols in wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) shows a lack of unification for different traffic patterns because the communication for sensor to actor and that for actor to actor are designed separately. Such a design poses a challenge for interoperability between sensors and actors. With the presence of rich-resource actor nodes, we argue that to improve network lifetime, the problem transforms from reducing overall network energy consumption to reducing energy consumption of constrained sensor nodes. To reduce energy consumption of sensor nodes, especially in challenging environments with coverage holes/obstacles, we propose that actor nodes should share forwarding tasks with sensor nodes. To enable such a feature, efficient interoperability between sensors and actors is required, and thus a unified routing protocol for both sensors and actors is needed. This paper explores capabilities of directional transmission with smart antennas and rich-resource actors to design a novel unified actor-oriented directional anycast routing protocol (ADA) which supports arbitrary traffic in WSANs. The proposed routing protocol exploits actors as main routing anchors as much as possible because they have better energy and computing power compared to constraint sensor nodes. In addition, a directional anycast routing approach is also proposed to further reduce total delay and energy consumption of overall network. Through extensive experiments, we show that ADA outperforms state-of-the-art protocols in terms of packet delivery latency, network lifetime, and packet reliability. In addition, by offer fault tolerant features, ADA also performs well in challenging environments where coverage holes and obstacles are of concerns.