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Emissions from mobile sources and stationary sources contribute to atmospheric pollution in China, and its components, which include ultrafine particles (UFPs), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and other reactive gases, such as NH

Sputtered amorphous indium-gallium-zinc -oxide (a-IGZO) Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) were comparatively investigated without and with a passivation layer (PL). The a-IGZO SBDs without PLs were found to be highly unstable in the atmosphere and under electrical stress. During the implementation of silicon dioxide (SiO2) PL, the associated thermal oxidization and hydrogen doping resulted in high-performance metrics, including an ideality factor close to the unity, a high Schottky barrier of 0.82 eV, and a large current rectification ratio of over 108. Benefited from the PL protection and ideal Schottky contact, the environmental and electrical stabilities of SBDs were significantly enhanced.

A build-in data inversion method to retrieve aerosol size distributions based on the principle of particle electrical mobility has been introduced, whose required computational effort is low for a portable ultrafine particle sizer (PUPS). The PUPS is cost-effective for the measurements of the fine and ultrafine particles in polluted environments near-source (e.g., cities with high traffic density, freeways, airports or stationary combustion sources). The particle sizer is mainly composed of a unipolar charger, a plate differential mobility analyzer (PDMA), and a Faraday cup electrometer (FCE). The classification efficiencies of the PDMA are strongly dependent on the charging distribution of the unipolar charger, in which multiple charging is more significant than that for a bipolar charger. To reduce the excessive overlap in the kernel function caused by multiple charging, a guidance method for selecting the classification voltages and operating parameters of the PDMA is proposed with the help of MATLAB. Subsequently, a combination of the nonnegative least squares (NNLS) algorithm and post facto smoothing method has been employed to derive the discretized solution of the Fredholm integral equation of the first kind. In the end, the accuracy and stability of the proposed approach are tested under a range of particle size distribution scenarios. The synthesized data results show that for the unimodal aerosol distribution, almost all of the relative errors are less than 20 %, regardless of nonideal operating conditions. The inversion algorithm can be run on Cortex-M3, an ARM embedded chip for low-cost and low-power consumption applications. When a reasonable error range can be permitted, the inversion algorithm can meet the requirements of the PUPS.

The nonideal reverse leakage current of amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) Schottky barrier diode was comparatively investigated with and without the passivation layer. Based on experimental and simulation results, the underlying mechanism was revealed as the trap-assisted tunneling along the defective a-IGZO sidewall. The edge termination structures, dubbed “sidewall covering,” and “edge capping” were specifically proposed to mitigate the edge electric field and, thus, suppress the nonideal leakage current. This enables the simultaneously improved ideality factor ( n) and Schottky barrier height ( ΦB), respectively, of 1.16 and 1.13 eV, together with the noticeably enhanced breakdown voltage.

Herein, the ability to optimize the morphology and photovoltaic performance of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT)/ZnO hybrid bulk-heterojunction solar cells via introducing all-conjugated amphiphilic P3HT-based block copolymer (BCP), poly(3-hexylthiophene)-block-poly(3-triethylene glycol-thiophene) (P3HT-b-P3TEGT), as polymeric additives is demonstrated. The results show that the addition of P3HT-b-P3TEGT additives can effectively improve the compatibility between P3HT and ZnO nanocrystals, increase the crystalline and ordered packing of P3HT chains, and form optimized hybrid nanomorphology with stable and intimate hybrid interface. The improvement is ascribed to the P3HT-b-P3TEGT at the P3HT/ZnO interface that has strong coordination interactions between the TEG side chains and the polar surface of ZnO nanoparticles. All of these are favor of the efficient exciton dissociation, charge separation and transport, thereby, contributing to the improvement of the efficiency and thermal stability of solar cells. These observations indicate that introducing all-conjugated amphiphilic BCP additives can be a promising and effective protocol for high-performance hybrid solar cells.