Because plastics are cheap and light, their use is indispensable in our daily lives. However, the extensive use of plastics causes the disposal issue. Among various disposal processes, plastic recycling is of great attention because of minimizing waste and harmful byproducts. Herein, we recycle the most popular thermoplastic materials, high-density and low-density polyethylene, producing the anode materials for the Li-ion batteries. The electrochemical properties of the as-recycled soft carbon are investigated to study the energy storage capability as the anode of Li-ion batteries. Our work demonstrates the soft carbon recycled from plastic wastes is a promising anode material.

The capacity of high nickel Li(NixCoyMn1-x-y)O2 (NCM, x ≥ 0.8) cathodes is known to rapidly decline, a serious problem that needs to be solved in a timely manner. It was reported that cathode materials with the {010} plane exposed toward the outside, i.e., a radial structure, can provide facile Li+ diffusion paths and stress buffer during repeated cycles. In addition, cathodes with a core-shell composition gradient are of great interest. For example, a stable surface structure can be achieved using relatively low nickel content on the surface. In this study, precursors of the high-nickel NCM were synthesized by coprecipitation in ambient atmosphere. Then, a transition metal solution for coprecipitation was replaced with a low nickel content and the coprecipitation reaction proceeded for the desired time. The electrochemical analysis of the core-shell cathode showed a capacity retention of 94 % after 100 cycles, compared to the initial discharge capacity of 184.74 mA h/g. The rate capability test also confirmed that the core-shell cathode had enhanced kinetics during charging and discharging at 1 A/g.

Extensive research is being carried out on Ni-rich Li(NixCoyMn1-x-y)O2 (NCM) due to the growing demand for electric vehicles and reduced cost. In particular, Ni-rich Li(NixCoyMn1-x-y-zAlz)O2 (NCMA) is attracting great attention as a promising candidate for the rapid development of Co-free but electrochemically more stable cathodes. Al, an inactive element in the structure, helps to improve structural stability and is also used as a doping element to improve cycle capability in Ni-rich NCM. In this study, NCMA was successfully synthesized with the desired composition by direct coprecipitation. Boron and tin were also used as dopants to improve the battery performance. Macro- and microstructures in the cathodes were examined by microscopy and X-ray diffraction. While Sn was not successfully doped into NCMA, boron could be doped into NCMA, leading to changes in its physicochemical properties. NCMA doped with boron revealed substantially improved electrochemical properties in terms of capacity retention and rate capability compared to the undoped NCMA.

Due to the serious air pollution problem, interest in eco-friendly vehicles is increasing. Solving the problem of pollution will necessitate the securing of high energy storage technology for batteries, the driving force of eco-friendly vehicles. The reason for the continuing interest in the transition metal oxide LiMO2 as a cathode material with a layered structure is that lithium ions reveal high mobility in two-dimensional space. Therefore, it is important to investigate the effective intercalation and deintercalation pathways of Li+, which affect battery capacity, to understand the internal structure of the cathode particle and its effect on the electrochemical performance. In this study, for the cathode material, high nickel Ni0.8Co0.1Mn0.1(OH)2 precursor is synthesized by controlling the ammonia concentration. Thereafter, the shape of the primary particles of the precursor is investigated through SEM analysis; X-ray diffraction analysis is also performed. The electrochemical properties of LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2 are evaluated after heat treatment.

Recent industrialization has led to a high demand for the use of fossil fuels. Therefore, the need for producing hydrogen and its utilization is essential for a sustainable society. For an eco-friendly future technology, photoelectrochemical water splitting using solar energy has proven promising amongst many other candidates. With this technique, semiconductors can be used as photocatalysts to generate electrons by light absorption, resulting in the reduction of hydrogen ions. The photocatalysts must be chemically stable, economically inexpensive and be able to utilize a wide range of light. From this perspective, cuprous oxide(Cu2O) is a promising p-type semiconductor because of its appropriate band gap. However, a major hindrance to the use of Cu2O is its instability at the potential in which hydrogen ion is reduced. In this study, gold is used as a bottom electrode during electrodeposition to obtain a preferential growth along the (111) plane of Cu2O while imperfections of the Cu2O thin films are removed. This study investigates the photoelectrochemical properties of Cu2O. However, severe photo-induced corrosion impedes the use of Cu2O as a photoelectrode. Two candidates, TiO2 and SnO2, are selected for the passivation layer on Cu2O by by considering the Pourbaix-diagram. TiO2 and SnO2 passivation layers are deposited by atomic layer deposition(ALD) and a sputtering process, respectively. The investigation of the photoelectrochemical properties confirmed that SnO2 is a good passivation layer for Cu2O.

Nickel oxide(NiO) thin films, nanorods, and carbon nanotube(CNT)/NiO core-shell nanorod structures are fabricated by sputtering Nickel at different deposition time on alumina substrates or single wall carbon nanotube templates followed by oxidation treatments at different temperatures, 400 and 700 oC. Structural analyses are carried out by scanning electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction. NiO thinfilm, nanorod and CNT/NiO core-shell nanorod structurals of the gas sensor structures are tested for detection of H2S gas. The NiO structures exhibit the highest response at 200 oC and high selectivity to H2S among other gases of NO, NH3, H2, CO, etc. The nanorod structures have a higher sensing performance than the thin films and carbon nanotube/NiO core-shell structures. The gold catalyst deposited on NiO nanorods further improve the sensing performance, particularly the recovery kinetics.

Lithium-ion batteries have been considered the most important devices to power mobile or small-sized devices due to their high energy density. LixCoO2 has been studied as a cathode material for the Li-ion battery. However, the limitation of its capacity impedes the development of high capacity cathode materials with Ni, Mn, etc. in them. The substitution of Mn and Ni for Co leads to the formation of solid solution phase LiNixMnyCo1-x-yO2 (NMC, both x and y < 1), which shows better battery performance than unsubstituted LiCoO2. However, despite a high discharge capacity in the Ni-rich compound (Ni > 0.8 in the metal site), poor cycle retention capability still remains to be overcome. In this study, aiming to improve the stability of the physical and chemical bonding, we investigate the stabilization effect of Ca in the Ni-rich layered compound Li(Ni0.83Co0.12Mn0.05)O2, and then Ca is added to the modified secondary particles to lower the degree of cationic mixing of the final particles. For the optimization of the final grains added with Ca, the Ca content (x = 0, 2.5, 5.0, 10.0 at.%) versus Li is analyzed.

Hydrothermal synthesis of highly crystalline TiO2 nanorods is a well-developed technique and the nanorods have been widely used as the template for growth of various core-shell nanorod structures. Magneli/CdS core-shell nanorod structures are fabricated for the photoelectrochemical cell (PEC) electrode to achieve enhanced carrier transport along the metallic magneli phase nanorod template. However, the long and thin TiO2 nanorods may form a high resistance path to the electrons transferred from the CdS layer. TiO2 nanorods synthesized are reduced to magneli phases, TixO2x-1, by heat treatment in a hydrogen environment. Two types of magneli phase nanorods of Ti4O7 and Ti3O5 are synthesized. Structural morphology and X-ray diffraction analyses are carried out. CdS nano-films are deposited on the magneli nanorods for the main light absorption layer to form a photoanode, and the PEC performance is measured under simulated sunlight irradiation and compared with the conventional TiO2/CdS core-shell nanorod electrode. A higher photocurrent is observed from the stand-alone Ti3O5/CdS coreshell nanorod structure in which the nanorods are grown on both sides of the seed layer.

Though the importance of spectral characteristics of Korean vowels in the hVd syllable has been recognized in the literature, it has never been studied whether static spectral measurements at a (steady-state) central section are enough to characterize Korean vowels in spontaneous speech, or dynamic spectral measurements across the temporal dimension can better characterize vowels. Despite ample reported evidence of the perceptual influence of non-spectral cues on spectral properties of vowels in the literature, no reports have yet been released on the difference in the degree of the perceptual influence of non-spectral cues (e.g., place and manner of the preceding or following phones, F0, speaking rate, prosody, and gender) on spectral properties of vowels. Through Neural Network pattern recognition modeling in a supervised mode, it was found that dynamic spectral models with non-spectral cues better explain vowel perception than static spectral models and furthermore, flanking phone identities, and manner and place of flanking phones are perceptually the most influential while duration, F0 and speaking rate are perceptually far less contributive than argued in the literature.

Traditionally the steady-state central section of the vowel length has been assumed to characterize the vowel quality. However, since Peterson and Barney (1952), this position has been challenged especially for American English monophthongal vowels. In this paper, introduced are low-ordered 12 mel-scale frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), which can characterize the shape of the oral cavity filter for monophthongal vowel production in the mel-scale domain. Four pattern recognition classification models are fitted to the measurements of spectral and cepstral parameters at multiple sections of the vowel duration along with F0, Gender and Duration for the AE vowel signals in the hVd syllable in Hillenbrand et al. (1995). It turns out that pattern recognition classifiers with the cepstral properties outperform those with spectral properties, reaching the perception level of American English listeners’.

Soonhyun Hong. 2017. Effects of Perceptual Training on the Identification of American English Monophthongal Vowels by Korean Listeners. Studies in Modern Grammar 95, 55-80. In this study, we tried to demonstrate that a forced choice vowel identification training with feedback for three weeks with naturally produced /hVd/ signals of multiple English talkers’, effectively facilitated 47 Korean listeners to learn to identify English monophthongs. The subjects were assessed before, after and two months after the training with an identification test composed of a group of vowel signals produced by multiple novel talkers. The results showed that the subjects’ identification accuracies improved sharply after training and the improvement persisted for two months. Furthermore, the response latencies at the identification test got drastically shortened at Posttest and the shortened latencies also persisted for two months. The results suggest the possibility that through three-week training, most of the training effects could be transferred from the short-term memory to the long-term memory.