Alkaline Stability of Low Oxophilicity Metallopolymer Anion-Exchange Membranes

Anion-exchange membrane fuel cells (AEMFCs) are promising energy conversion devices due to their high efficiency. Nonetheless, AEMFC operation time is currently limited by the low chemical stability of their polymeric anion-exchange membranes. In recent years, metallopolymers, where the metal centers assume the ion transport function, have been proposed as a chemically stable alternative. Here we present a systematic study using a polymer backbone with side-chain N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) ligands complexed to various metals with low oxophilicity, such as copper, zinc, nickel, and gold. The golden metallopolymer, using the metal with the lowest oxophilicity, demonstrates exceptional alkaline stability, far superior to state-of-the-art quaternary ammonium cations, as well as good in situ AEMFC results. These results demonstrate that judiciously designed metallopolymers may be superior to purely organic membranes and provides a scientific base for further developments in the field.     

Eigenvectors of random graphs: Nodal Domains

We initiate a systematic study of eigenvectors of random graphs. Whereas much is known about eigenvalues of graphs and how they reflect properties of the underlying graph, relatively little is known about the corresponding eigenvectors. Our main focus in this article is on the nodal domains associated with the different eigenfunctions. In the analogous realm of Laplacians of Riemannian manifolds, nodal domains have been the subject of intensive research for well over a hundred years. Graphical nodal domains turn out to have interesting and unexpected properties. Our main theorem asserts that there is a constant c such that for almost every graph G, each eigenfunction of G has at most two large nodal domains, and in addition at most c exceptional vertices outside these primary domains. We also discuss variations of these questions and briefly report on some numerical experiments which, in particular, suggest that almost surely there are just two nodal domains and no exceptional vertices. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 39, 39–58, 2011     

Approximate labelled subtree homeomorphism

Given two undirected trees T and P, the Subtree Homeomorphism Problem is to find whether T has a subtree t that can be transformed into P by removing entire subtrees, as well as repeatedly removing a degree-2 node and adding the edge joining its two neighbors. In this paper we extend the Subtree Homeomorphism Problem to a new optimization problem by enriching the subtree-comparison with node-to-node similarity scores. The new problem, called Approximate Labelled Subtree Homeomorphism (ALSH), is to compute the homeomorphic subtree of T which also maximizes the overall node-to-node resemblance. We describe an O(m²n/logm+mnlogn) algorithm for solving ALSH on unordered, unrooted trees, where m and n are the number of vertices in P and T, respectively. We also give an O(mn) algorithm for rooted ordered trees and O(mnlogm) and O(mn) algorithms for unrooted cyclically ordered and unrooted linearly ordered trees, respectively.     

Electroreduction of oxygen on cobalt phthalocyanine-modified carbide-derived carbon/carbon nanotube composite catalysts

Journal of Solid State Electrochemistry - In this work, composite materials based on carbide-derived carbon (CDC) and carbon nanotubes (CNT) modified with Co phthalocyanine (CoPc) were employed as...     

Fast index for approximate string matching

We present an index that stores a text of length n such that given a pattern of length m, all the substrings of the text that are within Hamming distance (or edit distance) at most k from the pattern are reported in $O(m+\log \log n+\text{\#}\text{matches})$ time (for constant k). The space complexity of the index is $O(n^{1+?})$ for any constant $?>0$.     

Water – A key parameter in the stability of anion exchange membrane fuel cells

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