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11 Mar 2024

European project will work on the development of low-cost wireless sensor networks for forest fire monitoring and early warning

Funded by the Program Interreg Sudoe of the European Union, it brings together institutions and companies from Spain, Portugal, France and the Principality of Andorra, with the collaboration of the Institute of Microelectronics of Barcelona. They will work on the development of devices that measure meteorological and environmental parameters relevant to fire risk assessment by municipalities and local communities in high fire risk areas.

Agenda

Highlights

Description of the monolithic ECL device and light emission schemes. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2023
All-Optical Electrochemiluminescence
Yiran Zhao, Julie Descamps, Nour al Hoda Al Bast, Marcos Duque, Jaume Esteve, Borja Sepulveda, Gabriel Loget, and Neso Sojic

Electrochemiluminescence (ECL) is widely employed for medical diagnosis and imaging. Despite its remarkable analytical performances, the technique remains intrinsically limited by the essential need for an external power supply and electrical wires for electrode connections. Here, we report an electrically autonomous solution leading to a paradigm change by designing a fully integrated all-optical wireless monolithic photoelectrochemical device based on a nanostructured Si photovoltaic junction modified with catalytic coatings. Under illumination with light ranging from visible to near-infrared, photogenerated holes induce the oxidation of the ECL reagents and thus the emission of visible ECL photons. The blue ECL emission is easily viewed with naked eyes and recorded with a smartphone. A new light emission scheme is thus introduced where the ECL emission energy (2.82 eV) is higher than the excitation energy (1.18 eV) via an intermediate electrochemical process. In addition, the mapping of the photoelectrochemical activity by optical microscopy reveals the minority carrier interfacial transfer mechanism at the nanoscale. This breakthrough provides an all-optical strategy for generalizing ECL without the need for electrochemical setups, electrodes, wiring constraints, and specific electrochemical knowledge. This simplest ECL configuration reported so far opens new opportunities to develop imaging and wireless bioanalytical systems such as portable point-of-care sensing devices.

Journal of the American Chemical Society 2023 145 (31), 17420-17426. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.3c05856

Representative images of the highly heterogeneous transformation of a stable TPD glass
Real-time microscopy of the relaxation of a glass
Marta Ruiz-Ruiz, Ana Vila-Costa, Tapas Bar, Cristian Rodríguez-Tinoco, Marta Gonzalez-Silveira, Jose Antonio Plaza, Jorge Alcalá, Jordi Fraxedas & Javier Rodriguez-Viejo

The understanding of the dynamics of a glass above its devitrification temperature remains incomplete. Here, we build a spatio-temporal map of the relaxation dynamics of a highly stable glass into its supercooled liquid using real-time atomic force microscopy imaging. This methodology enables direct visualization of the progression of the liquid phase and clarifies and quantifies the presence of localized fast mobility regions separated by giant length scales. Our data establish a clear correlation between dynamic length and time scales in glasses. This approach may also be applicable to unveil the microscopic structure and dynamics of other glass-forming systems with much shorter length and time scales, including liquid-cooled glasses.

Ruiz-Ruiz, M., Vila-Costa, A., Bar, T. et al. Nat. Phys. (2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02125-0

The IMB-CNM in 2 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiKq0sdXRp4&t=2s