Uniformly dispersed platinum nanoparticles loading on porous carbons without using reduction agents

Platinum nanoparticles loading on carbon nanotube, activated carbon, and activated carbon fiber was carried out by impregnation of hexachloro palatinate ion(IV) from hydrogen hexachloro platinate hydrate [H₂PtCl₆·5.7H₂O] dissolved solution without using reduction agents, and heating the hexachloro platinate(IV) impregnated carbons up to 800 °C. When the initial platinum content was controlled to 1000 ppm in the solution, the adsorption capacities of hexachloro platinate(IV) on carbon nanotube, activated carbon and activated carbon fiber were 24%, 47%, and 76%, respectively at the equilibrium state. The adsorption isotherm type of hexachloro platinate(IV) on carbon nanotube was two-step linear and quite different from Langmuir model of activated carbon fiber due to the uniformly developed cylindrical pore structure and size distribution. The average platinum particle size on porous carbons was under 2 nm by heating the hexachloro platinate(IV) up to 400 °C in spite of non-using reduction agents, while the average size increased due to the agglomeration of some particles by heating them up to 800 °C. Therefore, uniformly distributed platinum nanoparticles loading on porous carbons can be obtained from simple impregnation of hexachloro palatinate ion(IV) from solution and heating it up to 400 °C.     

Novel carbon fiber/epoxy composite toughened by electrospun polysulfone nanofibers

Novel carbon fiber/epoxy composite toughened by electrospun polysulfone (PSF) nanofibers was prepared to enhance fracture toughness of the composite, and compared the morphology and toughness to those of composite toughened by PSF films prepared by solvent method. Polysulfone nanofibers with the average diameter of 230 nm were directly electrospun onto carbon fiber/epoxy prepregs to toughen the composite. SEM observations of the polysulfone nanofibers toughened composite revealed that polysulfone spheres with uneven sizes presented uniform dispersion through interleaves of the composite, which was different from those of composite toughened by PSF films. Mode I fracture toughness (G_IC) of the nanofibers toughened composite was 0.869 kJ/m² for 5.0 wt.% polysulfone nanofibers content, which was 140% and 280% higher than those of PSF films toughened and untoughened composite due to the uniform distribution of polysulfone spheres.     

Synthesis and characterization of polymer electrolyte membrane containing methylisatin moiety by polyhydroalkylation for fuel cell

High molecular weight polymer containing N-methylisatin was synthesized by superacid-catalyzed polyhydroxyalkylation reactions. Their functionality with sulfonic acid groups and the measurement of apposite parameters for proton exchange membranes (PEMs) were described. Sulfonic acid groups were introduced into the polymer through sulfonation reaction with chlorosulfonic acid. The membranes were casted from the solution of sulfonated polymer in dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO). The structural properties of the synthesized polymers were investigated by ¹H NMR spectroscopy. The membranes were studied by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), ion exchange capacity (IEC), water uptake, dimensional stability and proton conductivity assessment. Different levels of sulfonation and ion exchange were tested; the resulting membranes exhibited high proton conductivities of up to 88.63 mS/cm. The sulfonated membranes showed good dimensional stability owing to having all carbon-carbon linkages on polymers' backbone.     

Anion conductive tetra-sulfonium hydroxides poly(fluorenylene ether sulfone) membrane for fuel cell application

A series of anion exchange membranes of poly (fluorenylene ether sulfone) containing tertiary sulfonium hydroxide-functionalized fluorenyl groups were synthesized by sequential polycondensation, chloromethylation, substitution with dimethyl sulfide and ion exchange. They showed excellent solubility in polar aprotic solvents. Consequently, flexible and tough alkaline membranes with varying ionic contents were obtained by an anion exchange of tertiary sulfonium chloride polymers with 1.0 M KOH at room temperature. Different levels of substitution were performed to achieve high ionic conductivity as well as upholding the membranes’ mechanical stability. The tertiary sulfonium membranes demonstrated lower water uptake compared to quaternary ammonium membrane. High hydroxide ion conductivity was achieved up to 18.3 mS cm^?1 at 80 °C with the membrane of the highest ion exchange capacity (IEC, 1.51 mmol g^?1). The resulting alkaline polymers were characterized by ¹H NMR, FT-IR, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), water uptake, IEC, atomic force microscopic (AFM) images.     

Flexible highly-effective energy harvester via crystallographic and computational control of nanointerfacial morphotropic piezoelectric thin film

Controlling the properties of piezoelectric thin films is a key aspect for designing highly effident flexible electromechanical devices.In this stud~ the crystallographic phenomena of PbZr1-xTixO3 (PZT) thin films caused by distinguished interfacial effects are deeply investigated by overlooking views,including not only an experimental demonstration but also ab initio modeling.The polymorphic phase balance and crystallinity,as well as the crystal orientation of PZT thin films at the morphotropic phase boundary (MPB),can be stably modulated using interfacial crystal structures.Here,interactions with MgO stabilize the PZT crystallographic system well and induce the texturing influences,while the PZT film remains quasi-stable on a conventional Al2O3 wafer.On the basis of this fundamental understanding,a high-output flexible energy harvester is developed using the controlled-PZT system,which shows significantly higher performance than the unmodified PZT generator.The voltage,current,and power densities are improved by 556％,503％,and 822％,respectively,in comparison with the previous flexional single-crystalline piezoelectric device.Finally,the improved flexible generator is applied to harvest tiny vibrational energy from a real traffic system,and it is used to operate a commercial electronic unit.These results clearly indicate that atomic-scale designs can produce significant impacts on macroscopic applications.     

Two-stage multi-intent detection for spoken language understanding

This paper presents a system to detect multiple intents (MIs) in an input sentence when only single-intent (SI)-labeled training data are available. To solve the problem, this paper categorizes input sentences into three types and uses a two-stage approach in which each stage attempts to detect MIs in different types of sentences. In the first stage, the system generates MI hypotheses based on conjunctions in the input sentence, then evaluates the hypotheses and then selects the best one that satisfies specified conditions. In the second stage, the system applies sequence labeling to mark intents on the input sentence. The sequence labeling model is trained based on SI-labeled training data. In experiments, the proposed two-stage MI detection method reduced errors for written and spoken input by 20.54 and 17.34 % respectively.     

Active sound profiling of narrowband signals for improving sound quality in an enclosed space

In this paper, an active sound profiling (ASP) system based on the command-FxLMS algorithm was implemented in an enclosed space for improving sound quality. This ASP system was designed to track a pre-defined target signal against rpm in order to actively reduce and enhance the disturbance signal from a rotating machine. The control system consists of an error microphone at a control point, a midrange loudspeaker and a subwoofer in the enclosed space with a digital signal processing board. The real-time control experiment with the ASP system was carried out in the enclosed space to track the target signal of 9 orders from C2 to C6 which was defined because the disturbance signal before control had poor sound quality. Sound pressure levels (SPLs) of the 9 orders were attenuated or enhanced over rpm. The root mean square values of the deviations between the SPLs after control and the target SPLs of the orders became about 1.62–5.23 dB, which were dramatically reduced compared to the deviations before control. This result showed that the ASP algorithm in the control experiment improved sound quality greatly.     

SoTCM: a scene-oriented task complexity metric for gaze-supported teleoperation tasks

Recent developments in human–robot interaction (HRI) research have heightened the need to incorporate indirect human signals to implicitly facilitate intuitive human–guided interactions. Eye-gaze has been widely used nowadays as an input interface in multi-modal teleoperation scenarios due to their advantage in revealing human intentions and forthcoming actions. However, to date, there has been no discussion about how the structure of the environment, that the human is interacting with, could affect the complexity of the teleoperation task. In this paper, a new metric named “Scene-oriented Task Complexity Metric” (SoTCM) is proposed to estimate the complexity of a certain scene that is involved in eye-gaze-supported teleoperation tasks. The proposed SoTCM objectively estimates the effort that could be exerted by the human operator in terms of the expected time required to point at all the informative locations retrieved from the scene under discussion. The developed SoTCM depends on both the density and distribution of the informative locations in the scene, while incorporates the eye movement behavior found in the psychology literature. The proposed SoTCM is subjectively validated by using the time-to-complete index in addition to the standard (NASA-TLX) workload measure in eight varying structure scenes. Results confirmed a significant relation between SoTCM and the measured task workload which endorses the applicability of using SoTCM in predicting scene complexities and subsequently the task workload in advance.