The effects of P3HT crystallinity in bilayer structure organic solar cells

Because of favorable charge transport properties with a lower possibility of recombination, bilayer structure solar cells have received significant ongoing attention. The simplest approach to obtain better transport properties of a charge carrier is to increase the crystallinity of the active layer. In this work, we investigated the effect of the crystallinity of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) on the PCE of bilayer solar cells. The self-assembled nano-fibril morphology induced by the addition of the non-soluble acetonitrile (AN) solvent induces a significant improvement of charge transport properties in field-effect transistors (FET). However, the self-assembled nano-fibril morphology of P3HT did not have a beneficial effect on the bilayer solar cells. Since the P3HT nano-fibrils were generally placed in parallel with the substrate, the FET device which uses lateral transport could produce an enhancement of the device properties. However, because of the difficulty of charge transport in the vertical direction between horizontally aligned fibrils, the properties of the solar cell device did not improve with increased P3HT crystallinity. Therefore, we concluded that simply increasing the crystallinity may not be sufficient to deliver a PCE enhancement in bilayer structures because of the anisotropic transport properties of the semiconducting polymer which depend on the orientation of the backbone.     

Ferromagnetic-insulators-modulated transport properties on the surface of a topological insulator

Transport properties on the surface of a topological insulator （TI） under the modulation of a two-dimensional （2D） ferromagnet/ferromagnet junction are investigated by the method of wave function matching. The single ferromagnetic barrier modulated transmission probability is expected to be a periodic function of the polarization angle and the planar rotation angle, that decreases with the strength of the magnetic proximity exchange increasing. However, the transmission probability for the double ferromagnetic insulators modulated n-n junction and n-p junction is not a periodic function of polarization angle nor planar rotation angle, owing to the combined effects of the double ferromagnetic insulators and the barrier potential. Since the energy gap between the conduction band and the valence band is narrowed and widened respectively in ranges of 0 ≤ 0 〈π/2 and r/2 〈 0 ≤ π, the transmission probability of the n-n junction first increases rapidly and then decreases slowly with the increase of the magnetic proximity exchange strength. While the transmission probability for the n-p junction demonstrates an opposite trend on the strength of the magnetic proximity exchange because the band gaps contrarily vary. The obtained results may lead to the possible realization of a magnetic/electric switch based on TIs and be useful in further understanding the surface states of TIs.     

Preliminary study on CAD-based method of characteristics for neutron transport calculation

Our new method makes use of a CAD-based automatic modeling tool, MCAM, for geometry modeling and ray tracing of particle transport in method of characteristics （MOC）. It was found that it could considerably enhance the capability of MOC to deal with more complicated models for neutron transport calculation. In our study, the diamond-difference scheme was applied to MOC to reduce the spatial discretization errors of the fiat flux approximation. Based on MCAM and MOC, a new 2D MOC code was developed and integrated into the SuperMC system, which is a Super Multi-function Computational system for neutronics and radiation simulation. The numerical results demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the new method for neutron transport calculation in MOC.     

Integrating 1D and 2D hydrodynamic,sediment transport model for dam-break flow using finite volume method

The purpose of this study is to set up a dynamically linked 1D and 2D hydrodynamic and sediment transport models for dam break flow.The 1D-2D coupling model solves the generalized shallow water equations,the non-equilibrium sediment transport and bed change equations in a coupled fashion using an explicit finite volume method.It considers interactions among transient flow,strong sediment transport and rapid bed change by including bed change and variable flow density in the flow continuity and momentum equations.An unstructured Quadtree rectangular grid with local refinement is used in the 2D model.The intercell flux is computed by the HLL approximate Riemann solver with shock captured capability for computing the dry-to-wet interface for all models.The effects of pressure and gravity are included in source term in this coupling model which can simplify the computation and eliminate numerical imbalance between source and flux terms.The developed model has been tested against experimental and real-life case of dam-break flow over fix bed and movable bed.The results are compared with analytical solution and measured data with good agreement.The simulation results demonstrate that the coupling model is capable of calculating the flow,erosion and deposition for dam break flows in complicated natural domains.     

Electron transport in dye-sensitized solar cells based on TiO2 nanowires

Anatase titanium dioxide nanowire arrays were prepared by hydrothermally oxidizing titanium foils in aqueous alkali and transferred onto fluorinated tin oxide(FTO)glass for use as the photoanodes of front side illuminated dye-sensitized solar cells(DSCs).Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy(EIS)measurement was applied to compare the electron transport and recombination properties of DSCs using TiO2nanowire films and TiO2nanoparticle films as photoanodes.It was found that the nanowire array films possess smaller electron transport resistance(Rt)and larger electron diffusion length(Le)in the photoanodes,suggesting that the nanowire arrays can enhance the electron transport rate and have a potential to improve the charge collection efficiency of DSCs.     

Electrical and thermal transport properties of CdO ceramics

High temperature electrical and thermal transport properties, that is, electrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient and thermal conductivity, of CdO ceramics have been investigated. Because of the good electrical properties and low thermal conductivity, the dimensionless figure-of-merit ZT of the CdO ceramics reaches 0.34 at 1023 K. This value is comparable to the best reported ZT for the n-type oxide ceramic thermoelectric materials and remains as potential to be further improved by porosity controlling or nanostructuring.     

First-principles investigation on transport properties of NiO monowire-based molecular device

The electronic transport properties of novel NiO monowire connected to the gold electrodes are investigated using density functional theory combined with nonequilibrium Green's functions formalism. The densities of states of the monowire under various bias conditions are discussed. The transport properties are discussed in terms of the transmission spectrum and current–voltage characteristics of NiO monowire. The transmission pathways provide the insight to the transmission of electrons along the monowire. With different bias voltages, current in the order of few microampere flows across the monowire. The applied voltage controls the flow of current through the monowire, which can be used to control the current efficiently in the low order of magnitude in the molecular device.     

Pierre Turq,an inspirational scientist in charge and at interfaces

Pierre Turq has made decisive contributions to the theory and to the multiscale simulation of charged systems, such as molten salts, electrolyte solutions and colloidal suspensions, in the bulk, at interfaces and under confinement. His research line focussed on dynamical properties and was characterised by constant efforts to connect his theoretical work to both experiments and practical applications. In this article, his colleagues and former students pay a tribute to his past and current research interests by illustrating some recent developments accomplished in his laboratory.     

A resource-saving decoding scheme of the orthogonally concatenated codes for optical transport networks in FPGA

A decoding scheme of the orthogonally concatenated codes with low resource utilizations is proposed. In the optical transport networks (OTN), forward error-correction (FEC) techniques are used to reduce the errors which occur in transmissions. Two-orthogonal-concatenated (TOC) codes are widely used in FEC techniques for their powerful error-correction capabilities based on the iterative decoding procedure. However, the framing structure is complex so the decoding procedure is more difficult than the decoding of in–out concatenated codes. And the powerful error-correction capability relies on the multi-iterative decoding processing, thus how to effectively utilize the hardware resources is a very important problem. Especially when the decoding procedure is implemented in the field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices, effective optimizations are required for the limited resources. In this paper we present an iterative decoding scheme in FPGA with low resource utilizations. As an example, an actual engineering application under the G.975.1 recommendation is given to show the efficiency of the proposed design.