Metal Ions versus Protons: Tracking of Charge-Carrier Insertion into a Cathode Oxide in Aqueous Rechargeable Batteries

Protons in aqueous electrolytes can perform as an additional type of charge carrier for insertion/extraction in addition to the primary carrier cations in aqueous rechargeable batteries. Despite many diverse claims regarding the effect of protons, mutually conflicting experimental results and their interpretations without direct evidence have been reported over the last decade. Systematic examinations and analyses are thus imperative to clarify the conditions of proton insertion in aqueous rechargeable batteries. Utilizing V₂O₅ as a model cathode and beaker-type cells with a sufficient amount of ZnSO₄ aqueous electrolytes in this work, it is demonstrated that protons are inserted into the cathode prior to Zn-ions in low-pH conditions (pH ≤ 3.0). In stark contrast, the influence of protons on the discharge voltage and capacity is insignificant, when either the pH becomes higher (pH ≥ 4.0) or the electrolyte volume is considerably low in coin-type cells. Similar behavior of pH-dependent proton insertion is also verified in Na–, Mg–, and Al-ion electrolytes. Providing a resolution to the controversy regarding proton insertion, the present study emphasizes that the influence of protons substantially varies depending on the pH and relative volume of electrolytes in aqueous batteries.     

Designing Metallic and Insulating Nanocrystal Heterostructures to Fabricate Highly Sensitive and Solution Processed Strain Gauges for Wearable Sensors

All‐solution processed, high‐performance wearable strain sensors are demonstrated using heterostructure nanocrystal (NC) solids. By incorporating insulating artificial atoms of CdSe quantum dot NCs into metallic artificial atoms of Au NC thin film matrix, metal–insulator heterostructures are designed. This hybrid structure results in a shift close to the percolation threshold, modifying the charge transport mechanism and enhancing sensitivity in accordance with the site percolation theory. The number of electrical pathways is also manipulated by creating nanocracks to further increase its sensitivity, inspired from the bond percolation theory. The combination of the two strategies achieves gauge factor up to 5045, the highest sensitivity recorded among NC‐based strain gauges. These strain sensors show high reliability, durability, frequency stability, and negligible hysteresis. The fundamental charge transport behavior of these NC solids is investigated and the combined site and bond percolation theory is developed to illuminate the origin of their enhanced sensitivity. Finally, all NC‐based and solution‐processed strain gauge sensor arrays are fabricated, which effectively measure the motion of each finger joint, the pulse of heart rate, and the movement of vocal cords of human. This work provides a pathway for designing low‐cost and high‐performance electronic skin or wearable devices.     

Efficient processing of spatial joins with DOT-based indexing

A spatial join is a query that searches for a set of object pairs satisfying a given spatial relationship from a database. It is one of the most costly queries, and thus requires an efficient processing algorithm that fully exploits the features of the underlying spatial indexes. In our earlier work, we devised a fairly effective algorithm for processing spatial joins with double transformation (DOT) indexing, which is one of several spatial indexing schemes. However, the algorithm is restricted to only the one-dimensional cases. In this paper, we extend the algorithm for the two-dimensional cases, which are general in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications. We first extend DOT to two-dimensional original space. Next, we propose an efficient algorithm for processing range queries using extended DOT. This algorithm employs the quarter division technique and the tri-quarter division technique devised by analyzing the regularity of the space-filling curve used in DOT. This greatly reduces the number of space transformation operations. We then propose a novel spatial join algorithm based on this range query processing algorithm. In processing a spatial join, we determine the access order of disk pages so that we can minimize the number of disk accesses. We show the superiority of the proposed method by extensive experiments using data sets of various distributions and sizes. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method improves the performance of spatial join processing up to three times in comparison with the widely-used R-tree-based spatial join method.     

Memory effects of all‐solution‐processed oxide thin‐film transistors using ZnO nanoparticles

Abstract— Non‐volatile memory effects of an all‐solution‐processed oxide thin‐film transistor (TFT) with ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) as the charge‐trapping layer are reported. The device was fabricated by using a soluble MgInZnO active channel on a ZrHfO^x gate dielectric. ZnO NPs were used as the charge‐trapping site at the gate‐insulator—channel interface, and Al was used for source and drain electrodes. Transfer characteristics of the device showed a large clockwise hysteresis, which can be used to demonstrate its memory function due to electron trapping in the ZnO NP charge‐trapping layer. This memory effect has the potential to be utilized as a memory application on displays and disposable electronics.     

Synthesis and characterization of novel blue azo‐dye derivatives containing acrylate group for dye‐based color filters

Abstract— Even though dyes have a fine resolution and good chromaticities, they are not widely used as coloring materials for color filters (CFs) due to their low thermal stability and chemical resistance. A series of azo‐dye derivatives, which consist of two cross‐linkable acrylate or methacrylate groups to improve thermal and chemical properties, have been synthesized and used to fabricate color filters. The spectral properties and chemical/thermal stabilities of the fabricated CFs were investigated by comparing dye‐based CFs, without a complicated dispersion process, but with pigment‐based CFs using dispersed pigment. Also, more properties including the development test and surface morphologies lithographic properties were studied. The synthesized azo dyes were characterized by elemental analysis, UV‐visible spectra, IR, mass, and ¹H‐NMR spectra.     

Mobile robot localization with gyroscope and constrained Kalman filter

The odometry information used in mobile robot localization can contain a significant number of errors when robot experiences slippage. To offset the presence of these errors, the use of a low-cost gyroscope in conjunction with Kalman filtering methods has been considered by many researchers. However, results from conventional Kalman filtering methods that use a gyroscope with odometry can unfeasible because the parameters are estimated regardless of the physical constraints of the robot. In this paper, a novel constrained Kalman filtering method is proposed that estimates the parameters under the physical constraints using a general constrained optimization technique. The state observability is improved by additional state variables and the accuracy is also improved through the use of a nonapproximated Kalman filter design. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively offsets the localization error while yielding feasible parameter estimation.     

Psychiatric document retrieval using a discourse-aware model

With the increased incidence of depression-related disorders, many psychiatric websites have been developed to provide huge amounts of educational documents along with rich self-help information. Psychiatric document retrieval aims to assist individuals to locate documents relevant to their depressive problems efficiently and effectively. By referring to relevant documents, individuals can understand how to alleviate their depression-related symptoms according to recommendations from health professionals. This work proposes the use of high-level discourse information extracted from queries and documents to improve the precision of retrieval results. The discourse information adopted herein includes negative life events, depressive symptoms and semantic relations between symptoms, which are beneficial for better understanding of users' queries. Experimental results show that the discourse-aware retrieval model achieves higher precision than the word-based retrieval models, namely the vector space model (VSM) and Okapi model, adopting word-level information alone.     

以太网交换机的源指定组播方案

针对边缘网中组播数据转发效率不高的问题,提出以太网交换机的源指定组播方案。在该方案中,交换机利用对IGMPv3报文的嗅探实现指定源的组播数据转发。描述控制流和数据流的运行机制,对该机制进行仿真分析。与IGMPv2嗅探方案的比较结果证明,该方案性能较高。