Waste heat generated in most domestic and industrial appliances can lead to fracture or undesirable plastic deformation of materials. Developing new thermoelectric materials or improving the existing ones could be handy in minimizing waste heat. Skutterudites exhibit good electrical and modifiable thermal conductivities making them to be suitable candidates for thermoelectricity. Studies have...
Zinc oxide has attracted great interest in the last few years. This is because electronics based on ZnO have wide applications and better performance on account of improved electronic conductivity, lower power consumption, better stability, fast electron transfer kinetics and improved storage capacity. ZnO crystals are able to withstand much higher electric fields than silicon crystals, such...
ABSTRACT
The ever increasing demand of energy has necessitated the need of coming up with measures of seeking alternative energy sources. Solar energy is one of the most important alternative sources of energy. However,the use of the first and second generations solar cells made of silicon in making solar panels has notable shortcomings such as unaffordability and lack of longevity of the...
ABSTRACT
Conventional energy sources such as crude oil and fossil fuel have negative effects on the environment mainly due to pollution necessitating the development of alternative energy sources. Silicon based technology has been extensively used in solar cells, but is very expensive. SnO2 film has proved to be best material for fabrication of solar cells because it is non-toxic, abundant, is...
Previous studies of chalcopyrites as absorbers for intermediate band solar cells (IBSC)
mainly focused on Cu-based compounds, whose intermediate band is usually empty
due to its intrinsic p-type conductivity. AgAlS$_2$ chalcopyrite belongs to a group of direct band gap
semiconductors with novel applications in optoelectronic devices. Theoretical studies have hinted the possibility of using...
Photovoltaic solar cells (PSCs) have undergone a metamorphosis by adopting the halide perovskites with a chemical formula of ABX3. The ABX3 PSCs have arose a lot of research interests due to their high power conversion efficiency (PCE) of ≈22%. Traditionally for a long time, PSCs were based on hybrid organic-inorganic iodide CH3NH3PbI3, but due to the toxic Pb and its chemical instability, it...
Abstract
The Absorption and fluorescence emission spectra of 3-cyano-7-hydroxy-4-methylcoumarin (3C7H4M) were studied in solvents of different dielectric constant ε and refractive index n. Experimental ground and excited state dipole moments were established by means of solvatochromic shift method. Both the ground state and excited state dipole moments were. Results revealed that the...
We have described a simple theoretical model of an equation of state (EOS) for a two-dimensional system. The goal was to give a clear description of the interplay between hydrostatic change in surface area and the two dimensional in-plane pressure ($\mathscr{F}$). Of interest from this described EOS, was the measure a material's resilience to isotropic stretching ($\gamma$) that can in...
Computational modeling in materials science involves the employment of fundamental physical and life sciences as well as computer science to study the properties of matter at the microscopic level. Such studies can be carried out by electronic or atomistic approaches and the outcomes used to complement the applied sciences as well as to guide experimental research work. Over the last decade,...
Beryllium chalcogenides (BeX) are semiconductor materials which belong to the family of II-IV semi-conductors. They manifest in four-fold coordinated zinc-blende structure at 0GPa and 0K DFT conditions which is unique in the chalcogen family. These compounds have many useful technological applications yet some properties are yet to be explored due to their toxicity and thus the ab initio...
Copper oxides have attracted a lot of interest due to their photo-catalytic applications in solar cells, water splitting and CO 2 reduction. They are novel candidates to provision of clean renewable routes to fuels. These processes require that copper oxides should have a higher solar conversion efficiency which is to this date reported to be low for cost-effective applications. Previous...
While the sixth sustainable development goal to be achieved by 2030 is clean water and sanitation, there is still a global challenge in the supply of adequate clean water due to population growth and urbanization. This necessitates coming up with more affordable approaches of managing waste water. Photocatalytic degradation of pollutants has proved to be one of the promising ways of purifying...
Abstract
Shape memory alloys are a group of materials with two noteworthy properties; shape memory effects and superelasticity thus they have attracted a number of industrial applications. Elasticity is the ability of a material to resume its normal shape after being stretched or compressed when the elastic limit is not exceeded. Titanium Nickel, copper-based and iron-based shape memory...
Using first-principles calculation, the structural and mechanical properties of BP3N6 which adopts an orthorhombic structure with space group Pna21 (no. 33), were determined at three different pressure values (0, 20 and 42.4 GPa). The nine independent elastic constants meet all necessary and sufficient conditions for mechanical stability criteria for an orthorhombic crystal. BP3N6 show strong...
Peter c. Owino1*, Maurice M. Mwamburi1, Nuru R. Mlyuka2, Margaret E. Samiji2, Grace A. Kinunda2, David Waswa1, Christopher Maghanga3
1Department of Physics, University of Eldoret, P. O. Box 1125 – 30100, Eldoret, Kenya
2Department of Physics, Department of Chemistry,University of Dar es Salaam, P. O. Box 35063, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
3Department of Physical & biological Sciences, Kabarak...
Topological semi-metals are newly discovered states of quantum matter that have arose interest
in the research community due to their application in spintronics and valleytronics. There are
three types of topological semi-metals (TSMs); Dirac Semi-metal (DSM), Weyl Semi-metal (WSM)
and Node Line Semi-metal (NLSM), each with special features that makes them novel candidates
for future...
To this date, first-principles Density functional theory (DFT) has proven successful in the study of electronic structure of real materials. At the same time, we have plenty of program packages in which first-principles DFT has been implemented and are able to calculate material properties accurately and efficiently. However, the authors here in are concerned with the strongly correlated...
With today’s technological evolution, wireless networks have become very common for organizations, homes and public places. For any device to be authenticated and authorized to use any of the wireless network services, it must first be identified then authenticated and authorized to have access to the wireless network resources. One of the biggest challenges with implementing wireless...
Optical coatings have a variety of applications some of which include: -: transparent heat mirrors, antireflection coatings, architectural coatings, photo-thermal converters, photovoltaic converters and photo- catalysis. SnO2: F films are widely used for solar cell applications as the front electrode as well as other applications such as electrochromics and displays. Optical design of these...
