No Arabic abstract
Ionic thermoelectrics show great potential in low-grade heat harvesting and thermal sensing owing to their ultrahigh thermopower, low cost and ease in production. However, the lack of effective n-type ionic thermoelectric materials seriously hinders their applications. Here, we report giant and bidirectionally tunable thermopowers within an ultrawide range from -23 to +32 mV K-1 at 90% RH in solid ionic-liquid-based ionogels, rendering it among the best n- and p-type ionic thermoelectric materials. A novel thermopower regulation strategy through ion doping to selectively induce ion aggregates via strong ion-ion interactions is proposed. These charged aggregates are found decisive in modulating the sign and enlarging the magnitude of the thermopower in the ionogels. A prototype wearable device integrated with 12 p-n pairs is demonstrated with a total thermopower of 0.358 V K-1 in general indoor conditions, showing promise for ultrasensitive body heat detection.
We propose a frequency selective light trapping scheme that enables the creation of more visually-transparent and yet simultaneously more efficient semitransparent solar cells. A nanoparticle scattering layer and photonic stack back reflector create a selective trapping effect by total internal reflection within a medium, increasing absorption of IR light. We propose a strong frequency selective scattering layer using spherical TiO2 nanoparticles with radius of 255 nm and area density of 1.1% in a medium with index of refraction of 1.5. Using detailed numerical simulations for this configuration, we find that it is possible to create a semitransparent silicon solar cell that has a Shockley Queisser efficiency of 12.0%pm0.4% with a visible transparency of 60.2%pm1.3%, 13.3%pm1.3 more visibly-transparent than a bare silicon cell at the same efficiency.
Sulfur and nitrogen dual doped graphene have been extensively investigated in the field of oxygen reduction reaction, supercapacitors and batteries, but their magnetic and absorption performance have not been explored. Besides, the effects of doping sequence of sulfur and nitrogen atoms on the morphology, structural property and the corresponding microwave absorption performance of the dual doped graphene remain unexplored. In this work, nitrogen and sulfur dual doped graphene with different doping sequence were successfully prepared using a controllable two steps facile thermal treatment method. The first doping process played a decisive role on the morphology, crystal size, interlayer distance, doping degree and ultimately magnetic and microwave absorption properties of the dual doped graphene samples. Meanwhile, the second doping step affected the doping sites and further had a repairing or damaging effect on the final doped graphene. The dual doped graphene samples exhibited two pronounced absorption peaks which intensity was decided by the order of the doping elements. This nitrogen and sulfur dual doped graphene with controlled doping order provides a strategy for understanding of the interaction between nitrogen and sulfur as dual dopants in graphene and further acquiring microwave absorbing materials with tunable absorption bands by varying the doping sequence.
The reversible heat in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) due to entropy change is fundamentally important for understanding the chemical reactions in LIBs and developing proper thermal management strategies. However, the direct measurements of reversible heat are challenging due to the limited temperature resolution of applied thermometry. In this work, by developing an ultra-sensitive thermometry with a differential AC bridge using two thermistors, the noise-equivalent temperature resolution we achieve (10 uK) is several orders of magnitude higher than previous thermometry applied on LIBs. We directly observe reversible heat absorption of a LIR2032 coin cell during charging with negligible irreversible heat generation and a linear relation between heat generations and discharging currents. The cell entropy changes determined from the reversible heat agree excellently with those measured from temperature dependent open circuit voltage. Moreover, it is found that the large reversible entropy change can cancel out the irreversible entropy generation at a charging rate as large as C/3.7 and produce a zero-heat-dissipation LIB during charging. Our work significantly contributes to fundamental understanding of the entropy changes and heat generations of the chemical reactions in LIBs, and reveals that reversible heat absorption can be an effective way to cool LIBs during charging.
We propose a strategy for enabling photodissociation of a normally photostable molecule through coupling to a nanoparticle plasmon. The large possible coupling on the single-molecule level combined with the highly lossy nature of plasmonic modes, with lifetimes on the order of femtoseconds, opens an ultrafast decay channel for the molecule. For plasmon mode frequencies below the vertical photoexcitation energy of the molecule, the difference between excitation and emission energy is converted into vibrational energy on the molecular ground state in a Raman-like process. Under the correct conditions, this energy can be high enough to enable efficient photodissociation on the electronic ground state. We demonstrate the concept using numerical simulations of the Lindblad master equation for the hydrogen molecule in the vicinity of an aluminum nanoparticle, and explore the photodissociation efficiency as a function of various system parameters.
Thanks to the pioneering studies conducted on the fields of transformation optics (TO) and metasurfaces, many unprecedented devices such as invisibility cloaks have been recently realized. However, each of these methods has some drawbacks limiting the applicability of the designed devices for real-life scenarios. For instance, TO studies lead to bulky coating layer with the thickness that is comparable to, or even larger than the dimension of the concealed object. In this paper, based on the coordinate transformation, an ultrathin carpet cloak is proposed to hide objects with arbitrary shape and size using a thin anisotropic material, called as infinitely anisotropic medium (IAM). It is shown that unlike the previous metasurface-based carpet cloaks, the proposed IAM hides objects from all viewing incident angles while it is extremely thin compared with the object dimensions. This material also circumvents the conventional transformation optics complexities and could be easily implemented in practical scenarios. To demonstrate the capability of the proposed carpet cloak, several full-wave simulations are carried out. Finally, as a proof of concept, the IAM is implemented based on the effective medium theory which exhibits good agreement with the results obtained from the theoretical investigations. The introduced material not only constitutes a significant step towards the invisibility cloak but also can greatly promote the practical application of the other TO-based devices.