Search

Enhancing the efficiency of water electrolysis, which can be severely impacted by the nucleation and growth of bubbles, is key in the energy transition. In this combined experimental and numerical study, in-situ bubble evolution and dissolution processes are imaged and compared to numerical simulations employing the immersed boundary method. We find that it is crucial to include solutal driven natural convection in order to represent the experimentally observed bubble behaviour even though such effects have commonly been neglected in modelling efforts so far. We reveal how the convective patterns depend on current densities and bubble spacings, leading to distinctively different bubble growth and shrinkage dynamics. Bubbles are seen to promote the convective instability if their spacing is large ($\geq4$mm for the present conditions), whereas the onset of convection is delayed if the inter-bubble distance is smaller. Our approach and our results can help devise efficient mass transfer solutions for gas evolving electrodes., Comment: 30 pages, 13 figures

In electrochemical systems, an understanding of the underlying transport processes is required to aid in their better design. This includes knowledge of possible near-electrode convective mixing that can enhance measured currents. Here, for a binary acidic electrolyte in contact with a platinum electrode, we provide evidence of electroconvective instability during electrocatalytic proton reduction. The current-voltage characteristics indicate that electroconvection, visualized with a fluorescent dye, drives current densities larger than the diffusion transport limit. The onset and transition times of the instability do not follow the expected inverse-square dependence on the current density, but, above a bulk-reaction-limited current density are delayed by the water dissociation reaction. The dominant size of the electroconvective patterns is also measured and found to vary as the diffusion length scale, confirming previous predictions on the size of electroconvective vortices.

Confocal fluorescence microscopy is a proven technique, which can image near-electrode pH changes. For a complete understanding of electrode processes, time-resolved measurements are required, which have not yet been provided. Here we present the first measurements of time-resolved pH profiles with confocal fluorescence microscopy. The experimental results compare favorably with a one-dimensional reaction-diffusion model; this holds up to the point where the measurements reveal three-dimensionality in the pH distribution. Specific factors affecting the pH measurement such as attenuation of light and the role of dye migration are also discussed in detail. The method is further applied to reveal the buffer effects observed in sulfate-containing electrolytes. The work presented here is paving the way toward the use of confocal fluorescence microscopy in the measurement of 3D time-resolved pH changes in numerous electrochemical settings, for example in the vicinity of bubbles., Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Supplementary information

DNA sequencing is the physical/biochemical process of identifying the location of the four bases (Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine) in a DNA strand. As semiconductor technology revolutionized computing, modern DNA sequencing technology (termed Next Generation Sequencing, NGS)revolutionized genomic research. As a result, modern NGS platforms can sequence hundreds of millions of short DNA fragments in parallel. The sequenced DNA fragments, representing the output of NGS platforms, are termed reads. Besides genomic variations, NGS imperfections induce noise in reads. Mapping each read to (the most similar portion of) a reference genome of the same species, i.e., read mapping, is a common critical first step in a diverse set of emerging bioinformatics applications. Mapping represents a search-heavy memory-intensive similarity matching problem, therefore, can greatly benefit from near-memory processing. Intuition suggests using fast associative search enabled by Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) by construction. However, the excessive energy consumption and lack of support for similarity matching (under NGS and genomic variation induced noise) renders direct application of TCAM infeasible, irrespective of volatility, where only non-volatile TCAM can accommodate the large memory footprint in an area-efficient way. This paper introduces GeNVoM, a scalable, energy-efficient and high-throughput solution. Instead of optimizing an algorithm developed for general-purpose computers or GPUs, GeNVoM rethinks the algorithm and non-volatile TCAM-based accelerator design together from the ground up. Thereby GeNVoM can improve the throughput by up to 113.5 times (3.6); the energy consumption, by up to 210.9 times (1.36), when compared to a GPU (accelerator) baseline, which represents one of the highest-throughput implementations known.

We demonstrate a novel method for nanowire formation by natural selection during wet chemical etching in boiling Phosphoric acid. It is observed that wire lateral dimensions of sub-10 nm and lengths of 700 nm or more have been naturally formed during the wet etching. The dimension variation is controlled through etching times wherein the underlying cause is the merging of the nearby crystallographic hexagonal etch pits. The emission processes involving excitons are found to be efficient and lead to enhanced emission characteristics. The exciton binding energy is augmented by using quantum confinement whereby enforcing greater overlap of the electron-hole wave-function. The surviving nanowires are nearly defect-free, have large exciton binding energies of around 45 meV and a small temperature variation of the output electroluminescent light. We have observed superluminescent behaviour of the LEDs formed on these nanowires. There is no observable efficiency roll off till current densities of 400 A/cm2. The present work thus provides an innovative and cost effective manner of device fabrication on the formed nanowires and proves the immediate performance enhancement achievable., Comment: 13 pages (main text and supplementary), 4 figures in main text and 6 figures in supplementary text