Detrimental Effects of Doping Al and Ba on the Thermoelectric Performance of GeTe.

GeTe-based materials are emerging as viable alternatives to toxic PbTe-based thermoelectric materials. In order to evaluate the suitability of Al as dopant in thermoelectric GeTe, a systematic study of thermoelectric properties of GeAlTe ( = 0⁻0.08) alloys processed by Spark Plasma Sintering are presented here.

High Water Flux with Ions Sieving in a Desalination 2D Sub-Nanoporous Boron Nitride Material.

Over the past decades, desalination by reverse osmosis (RO) membranes has attracted increasing attention. Although RO has proven its efficiency, it remains, however, relatively costly because of the use of high-pressure pumps and the low water permeability of conventional cross-linked polymer membranes. One route to improve the desalination performance consists of using membranes made from sub-nanoporous boron nitride (sNBN) monolayers.

Fast calculation of the electrostatic potential in ionic crystals by direct summation method.

An efficient real space method is derived for the evaluation of the Madelung's potential of ionic crystals. The proposed method is an extension of Evjen's method. It takes advantage of a general analysis of the potential convergence in real space.

Influence of the incommensurability in Sr14-xCaxCu24O41 Family Compounds.

We study the influence of the structural modulation on the low energy physics of the Sr14-xCaxCu24O41 oxides, using ab initio determination of the on-site and nearest-neighbor effective parameters. The structural modulations appear to be the key degree of freedom responsible for the low energy properties, such as the electron localization, the formation of dimers in the x=0 compound, or the antiferromagnetic order in the x=13.6 compound.