Vapor Phase Dealloying Derived Nanoporous Co@CoO/RuO2 Composites for Efficient and Durable Oxygen Evolution Reaction (Adv. Funct. Mater. 17/2023)

The development of low-cost and effective oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalysts to expedite the slow kinetics of water splitting is crucial for increasing the efficiency of energy conversion from electricity to hydrogen fuel. Herein, 3D bicontinuous nanoporous Co@CoO/RuO₂ composites with tunable sizes and chemical compositions are fabricated by introducing vapor phase dealloying of cobalt-based alloys. The influence of physical parameters on the formation of nanoporous Co substrates with various feature ligament sizes is systematically investigated. The CoO/RuO₂ shell is constructed by integrating a thin layer of RuO₂ on the inner surface of nanoporous Co, where the CoO interlayer is formed by annealing oxidization. The composite catalyst delivers an ultralow overpotential of 198 mV at 10 mA cm⁻², Tafel slope of 57.1 mV dec⁻¹, and long-term stability of 50 h. The superior OER activity and fast reaction kinetics are attributed to charge transfer through the coupling of Co O Ru bonds at the interface and the excellent nanopore connectivity, while the durability originates from the highly stable CoO/RuO₂ interface.     

Leveraging Bioinspired Structural Constraints for Tunable and Programmable Snapping Dynamics in High-Speed Soft Actuators

Creating high-speed soft actuators will have broad engineering and technological applications. Snapping provides a power-amplified mechanism to achieve rapid movements in soft actuators that typically show slow movements. However, precise control of snapping dynamics (e.g., speed and direction of launching or jumping) remains a daunting challenge. Here, a bioinspired design principle is presented that harnesses a reconfigurable constraint structure integrated into a photoactive liquid crystal elastomer actuator to enable tunable and programmable control over its snapping dynamics. By reconfiguring constrained fin-array-shaped structure, the snapping dynamics of the structured actuator, such as launching or jumping angle and height, motion speed, and release force can be on-demand tuned, thus enabling controllable catapult motion and programmable jumping. Moreover, the structured actuators exhibit a unique combination of ultrafast moving speed (up to 2.5 m s⁻¹ in launching and 0.22 m s⁻¹ in jumping), powerful ejection (long ejection distance of ≈20 cm, 35 mg ball), and high jumping height (≈8 cm, 40 times body lengths), which few other soft actuators can achieve. This study provides a new universal design paradigm for realizing controllable rapid movements and high-power motions in soft matter, which are useful for building high-performance soft robotics and actuation devices.     

Vapor Phase Growth of Centimeter-Sized Band Gap Engineered Cesium Lead Halide Perovskite Single-Crystal Thin Films with Color-tunable Stimulated Emission

Single crystal metal halide perovskites thin films are considered to be a promising optical, optoelectronic materials with extraordinary performance due to their low defect densities. However, it is still difficult to achieve large-scale perovskite single-crystal thin films (SCTFs) with tunable bandgap by vapor-phase deposition method. Herein, the synthesis of CsPbCl_3(1–x)Br_3x SCTFs with centimeter size (1 cm × 1 cm) via vapor-phase deposition is reported. The Br composition of CsPbCl_3(1–x)Br_3x SCTFs can be gradually tuned from x = 0 to x = 1, leading the corresponding bandgap to change from 2.29 to 2.91 eV. Additionally, an low-threshold (≈23.9 µJ cm⁻²) amplified spontaneous emission is achieved based on CsPbCl_3(1–x)Br_3x SCTFs at room temperature, and the wavelength is tuned from 432 to 547 nm by varying the Cl/Br ratio. Importantly, the high-quality CsPbCl_3(1–x)Br_3x SCTFs are ideal optical gain medium with high gain up to 1369.8 ± 101.2 cm⁻¹. This study not only provides a versatile method to fabricate high quality CsPbCl_3(1–x)Br_3x SCTFs with different Cl/Br ratio, but also paves the way for further research of color-tunable perovskite lasing.     

A code-pattern-driven digital background calibration technique for SAR ADCs

The article presents the buck converter for the application on headlights of vehicle with chip-level design. The LED components are used as for lighting source, which near/far lights are controlled with high-current switching circuit in the chip. The level-shift circuit and its current driver is proposed to control the input of high-voltage power MOS. The bypass method is presented to reduce the transient time as load current changes suddenly. The input voltage widely ranges from 8 to 21 V while keeping a stable output voltage with 6 V. The chip current can output from 20 to 1500 mA with excellent regulation. This chip had been implemented with TSMC0.25 µm HV- process, and the size of the circuit layout is about 8.6 mm², where includes power switch and far/near lighting switches. Measurements show that peak efficiency can achieve 86.3%. The power regulation is excellent, where the load regulation is only 0.3%, and the line regulation is only 0.5%.

     

Research on the Mechanical Properties of Magnetorheological Damping and the Performance of Microprobe Test Process

Journal of Electronic Testing - In order to control the stable and controllable loading of the wafer level microprobe test bench, the magnetorheological (MR) damper used in the existing research...     

Structural and optical properties of AIN sputtering deposited on sapphire substrates with various orientations

AIN thin films were deposited on c-,a-and r-plane sapphire substrates by the magnetron sputtering technique.The in-fluence of high-temperature thermal annealing (HTTA) on the structural,optical properties as well as surface stoichiometry were comprehensively investigated.The significant narrowing of the (0002) diffraction peak to as low as 68 arcsec of AIN after HTTA implies a reduction of tilt component inside the AIN thin films,and consequently much-reduced dislocation densities.This is also supported by the appearance of E2(high) Raman peak and better Al-N stoichiometry after HTTA.Furthermore,the in-creased absorption edge after HTTA suggests a reduction of point defects acting as the absorption centers.It is concluded that HTTA is a universal post-treatment technique in improving the crystalline quality of sputtered AIN regardless of sapphire orienta-tion.     

Saliency guided self-attention network for pedestrian attribute recognition in surveillance scenarios

Pedestrian attribute recognition is often considered as a multi-label image classification task. In order to make full use of attribute-related location information, a saliency guided sel-attention network ( SGSA-Net) was proposed to weakly supervise attribute localization, without annotations of attribute-related regions. Saliency priors were integrated into the spatial attention module ( SAM ). Meanwhile,channel-wise attention and spatial attention were introduced into the network. Moreover, a weighted binary cross-entropy loss ( WCEL) function was employed to handle the imbalance of training data. Extensive experiments on richly annotated pedestrian ( RAP) and pedestrian attribute ( PETA) datasets demonstrated that SGSA-Net outperformed other state-of-the-art methods.     

静电喷印技术在太赫兹超表面制备中的应用

近年来,太赫兹技术快速发展,基于超表面的太赫兹器件受到广泛关注,并已应用于太赫兹成像、光谱和生物传感等诸多领域。但太赫兹超表面器件的制备复杂且成本高,而静电喷印技术无需掩模版,成本低、精度高且易于在异形曲面上制作。基于静电喷印技术设计和制备了太赫兹吸波器,并利用太赫兹时域光谱系统（THz-TDS）对样品进行了性能测试,实验与仿真结果基本相符,在0.098~0.353 THz频段内吸收大于90%。此外,还设计了太赫兹线极化转换器,在0.167~0.355 THz频段内的极化转换大于95%,相对带宽约72%,并分析了所设计样品的制备工艺条件,验证了静电喷印技术对于制备太赫兹极化转换器的可行性。研究成果表明,静电喷印技术在太赫兹超表面器件的制备中具有广泛的应用前景。     

Special Issue on Advanced Network Security: Methods and Applications

Mobile Networks and Applications -