Nanjing University of Science and Technology

About: Nanjing University of Science and Technology is a education organization based out in Nanjing, China. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Catalysis & Computer science. The organization has 31581 authors who have published 36390 publications receiving 525474 citations. The organization is also known as: Nánjīng Lǐgōng Dàxué & Nánlǐgōng.

Terrestrial carbon cycle affected by non-uniform climate warming

Abstract: Feedbacks between the terrestrial carbon cycle and climate change could affect many ecosystem functions and services. A synthesis of global air temperature data reveals non-uniform rates of climate warming on diurnal and seasonal timescales, and heterogeneous impacts on ecosystem carbon cycling.

Highly active, stable oxidized platinum clusters as electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction

Abstract: In the present work, we synthesized and characterized an electrocatalyst consisting of sub-nanometric Pt clusters uniformly dispersed on a TiO2 support. X-ray photoelectron spectra (XPS) and X-ray adsorption fine structure (XAFS) data demonstrate that these sub-nanometric Pt clusters are in a highly oxidized state and possess two localized Pt–O coordination structures. The Pt–O bonds between the oxidized Pt clusters and the TiO2 give rise to a strong metal–support interaction (SMSI). When applied to the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), this catalyst exhibits significantly enhanced catalytic activity (increased by a factor of up to 8.4) and enhanced stability compared with the state-of-the-art commercial Pt/C catalysts. Particularly, the additional XPS and XAFS characterizations of the catalyst after long-term electrolysis demonstrate the absence of metallic Pt species, confirming that the catalytic active site comes from the oxidized Pt clusters rather than from the the metallic Pt species. This improved performance is considered to be induced by the unique electronic structure of the oxidized Pt clusters and by the SMSI. Based on the results of density functional theory calculations, the 5d orbital of the oxidized Pt cluster atoms appears to hybridize with the H 1s orbital to form weak Pt–H valence bonds, leading to a ΔG (relative free energy) value of approximately zero eV for H* absorption. This effect explains the mechanism responsible for the excellent catalytic activity of these oxidized Pt clusters for the HER. This work therefore provides important insights into the role of oxidized Pt clusters as an HER electrocatalyst. The evident stabilization of the oxidized Pt clusters on TiO2 supports via the charge-transfer mechanism provides a useful approach for improving the durability of electrocatalysts that may be applicable to other noble metal/support systems.

Entropy as a Gene‐Like Performance Indicator Promoting Thermoelectric Materials

Abstract: High-throughput explorations of novel thermoelectric materials based on the Materials Genome Initiative paradigm only focus on digging into the structure-property space using nonglobal indicators to design materials with tunable electrical and thermal transport properties. As the genomic units, following the biogene tradition, such indicators include localized crystal structural blocks in real space or band degeneracy at certain points in reciprocal space. However, this nonglobal approach does not consider how real materials differentiate from others. Here, this study successfully develops a strategy of using entropy as the global gene-like performance indicator that shows how multicomponent thermoelectric materials with high entropy can be designed via a high-throughput screening method. Optimizing entropy works as an effective guide to greatly improve the thermoelectric performance through either a significantly depressed lattice thermal conductivity down to its theoretical minimum value and/or via enhancing the crystal structure symmetry to yield large Seebeck coefficients. The entropy engineering using multicomponent crystal structures or other possible techniques provides a new avenue for an improvement of the thermoelectric performance beyond the current methods and approaches.

UAV-Enabled Secure Communications: Joint Trajectory and Transmit Power Optimization

Abstract: This paper studies the physical layer security of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) network, where a UAV base station (UAV-B) transmits confidential information to multiple information receivers (IRs) with the aid of a UAV jammer (UAV-J) in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. We formulate an optimization problem to jointly design the trajectories and transmit power of UAV-B and UAV-J in order to maximize the minimum average secrecy rate over all IRs. The optimization problem is non-convex and the optimization variables are coupled, which leads to the optimization problem being mathematically intractable. As such, we decompose the optimization problem into two subproblems and then solve it by employing an alternating iterative algorithm and the successive convex approximation technique. Our results show that the average secrecy rate performance of the proposed scheme provides about 20% and 150% performance gains over the joint trajectory and transmit power optimization without UAV-J scheme and the transmit power optimization with fixed trajectory scheme at flight period $T=150$ s, respectively.