Publications by authors named "Benjamin Williamson"

The chemical flexibility of the tetragonal tungsten bronze (TTB) structure offers a large potential for compositional engineering. Cation size and vacancy concentration are known to affect its structure, cation disorder, and functional properties. However, the compositional complexity also makes the TTB structure challenging to understand.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Tidal stream environments are important areas of marine habitat for the development of marine renewable energy (MRE) sources and as foraging hotspots for megafaunal species (seabirds and marine mammals). Hydrodynamic features can promote prey availability and foraging efficiency that influences megafaunal foraging success and behaviour, with the potential for animal interactions with MRE devices. Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer a novel tool for the fine-scale data collection of surface turbulence features and animals, which is not possible through other techniques, to provide information on the potential environmental impacts of anthropogenic developments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * The study analyzes how point defects, specifically Li and O vacancies, affect the electronic structure at neutral domain walls in LiNbO, with findings indicating that these defects can enable n- or p-type conductivity.
  • * The research suggests that by controlling point defect populations through methods like thermal annealing and electric fields, it's possible to achieve reversible tuning between n- and p-type conduction, paving the way for rewritable pn-junctions in applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Corn (Zea mays) crops harvested as grain in autumn do not provide opportunity for cover crop establishment, which may be remedied by interseeding cover crops into growing corn. Grazing cover crops after corn grain harvest could provide added revenues and increase nutrient cycling in the system while providing additional ecosystem services. However, tradeoffs between cash crop productivity and cover crop inclusion, and use as grazed forage, are not fully understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Marine renewable energy developments can impact the environment in both direct ways, like collisions, and indirect ways, such as changes in ocean conditions.
  • Current UK guidelines for Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and Habitats Regulations Appraisal (HRA) do not adequately address how these changes affect the distribution and movements of top predators, such as seabirds and fish.
  • This study combines different data collection methods to better understand predator-prey relationships and suggests updating regulatory methods to improve assessments of ecosystem impacts related to climate change and renewable energy initiatives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The second largest family of oxide ferroelectrics, after perovskites, are the tetragonal tungsten bronzes (TTB) with the general formula A2A1CB1B2O. Cation disorder in TTBs is known to occur if the size difference between cations is small, but the impact of cation disorder on structure and properties has not yet been extensively addressed. In this study we investigate the effect of the size of the M cation, including cation disorder, on the crystal structure and dielectric properties in the two series BaMNbO (BMN, A = Na, K and Rb) and BaMNbTiO (BMNT, M = Ca, Sr).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To describe the development of a combined local antibiogram and assess its utility in an educational intervention.

Design: Retrospective analysis of a combined, multi-healthcare system antibiogram with an educational intervention and pre-post analysis.

Setting: Creation of the combined antibiogram included all health systems in Des Moines, Iowa.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Transparent conducting oxides have become ubiquitous in modern optoelectronics. However, the number of oxides that are transparent to visible light and have the metallic-like conductivity necessary for applications is limited to a handful of systems that have been known for the past 40 years. In this work, we use hybrid density functional theory and defect chemistry analysis to demonstrate that tri-rutile zinc antimonate, ZnSbO, is an ideal transparent conducting oxide and to identify gallium as the optimal dopant to yield high conductivity and transparency.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Four novel compositions containing chalcogenide layers, adopting the BaMOM'Ch layered structure have been identified: BaScOCuSe, BaYOCuS, BaScOAgSe and BaInOAgSe. A comprehensive comparison of experimental and computational results providing the crystallographic and electronic structure of the compounds under investigation has been conducted. Materials were synthesised at 800 °C under vacuum using a conventional ceramic synthesis route with combination of binary oxide and chalcogenide precursors.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This review provides a critical, multi-faceted assessment of the practical contribution tidal stream energy can make to the UK and British Channel Islands future energy mix. Evidence is presented that broadly supports the latest national-scale practical resource estimate, of 34 TWh/year, equivalent to 11% of the UK's current annual electricity demand. The size of the practical resource depends in part on the economic competitiveness of projects.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

-type transparent conductors (TCs) are key materials in the modern optoelectronics industry. Despite years of research, the development of a high-performance -type TC has lagged far behind that of its -type counterparts, delaying the advent of "transparent electronics"-based p-n junctions. Here, we propose the layered oxysulfide [CuS][SrScO] as a structural motif for discovering -type TCs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

sequencing of 28 Candida auris clade III isolates revealed the presence of concomitant V125A and F126L substitutions. Heterologous expression of Erg11-V125A/F126L in Saccharomyces cerevisiae led to reduced fluconazole and voriconazole susceptibilities. Generation of single substitution gene variants through site-directed mutagenesis uncovered that F126L primarily contributes to the elevated triazole MICs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We are at a crossroads where many nation states, including the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK), are committing to increased electricity production from "green energy", of which tidal stream marine renewable energy is one such resource. However, many questions remain regarding the effects of tidal energy devices on marine wildlife, including seabirds, of which the UK has internationally important numbers. Guidelines are lacking on how best to use both well-established and novel survey methods to assess seabird use of tidal flow areas, leading to a data-rich but information poor (DRIP) situation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) are ubiquitous in modern consumer electronics. SnO is an earth abundant, cheaper alternative to InO as a TCO. However, its performance in terms of mobilities and conductivities lags behind that of InO.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Multifunctional thin films which can display both photocatalytic and antibacterial activity are of great interest industrially. Here, for the first time, we have used aerosol-assisted chemical vapor deposition to deposit highly photoactive thin films of Cu-doped anatase TiO on glass substrates. The films displayed much enhanced photocatalytic activity relative to pure anatase and showed excellent antibacterial (vs and ) ability.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A simplistic and low-cost method that dramatically improves the performance of solution-grown hematite photoanodes for solar-driven water splitting through incorporation of nanohybrid metal oxide overlayers was developed. By heating the α-FeO/SnO-TiO electrode in an inert atmosphere, such as argon or nitrogen, the photocurrent increased to over 2 mA/cm at 1.23 V versus a reversible hydrogen electrode, which is 10 times higher than that of pure hematite under 1 sun (100 mW/cm, AM 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Active acoustic sensors are widely used in oceanographic and environmental studies. Although many have nominal operating frequencies above the range of marine mammal hearing, they can produce out-of-band sound that may be audible to marine mammals. Acoustic emissions from four active acoustic transducers were characterized and compared to marine mammal hearing thresholds.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rabies is a zoonotic lyssavirus of mammals that is a major public health threat due to the high mortality rate in humans who develop clinical symptoms. In the United States and other developed countries, the main reservoirs are wildlife species. In April 2017, a raccoon tested positive for rabies in Wise County, Virginia, with a second raccoon testing positive in May.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Modification of TiO to increase its visible light activity and promote higher performance photocatalytic ability has become a key research goal for materials scientists in the past 2 decades. One of the most popular approaches proposed this as "passivated codoping", whereby an equal number of donor and acceptor dopants are introduced into the lattice, producing a charge neutral system with a reduced band gap. Using the archetypal codoping pairs of [Nb + N]- and [Ta + N]-doped anatase, we demonstrate using hybrid density functional theory that passivated codoping is not achievable in TiO.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Phosphorus doped tin(iv) oxide (P:SnO) films have been synthesised by an aerosol assisted chemical vapour deposition route. Triethyl phosphate was used as the phosphorus dopant source. The phosphorus concentration in solution was found to be key to electrical properties, with concentrations between 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (HAXPES) has seen continuous development since the first experiments in the 1970s. HAXPES systems are predominantly located at synchrotron sources due to low photoionization cross sections necessitating high X-ray intensities, which limits the technique's availability to a wide range of users and potential applications. Here, a new laboratory-based instrument capable of delivering monochromated X-rays with an energy of 9.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

NbO is an important material able to exist in many polymorphs with unique optical properties and morphologies that are dependent on the synthetic route. Here we report a novel ambient-pressure chemical vapor deposition route to NbO via aerosol-assisted chemical vapor deposition. The amorphous as-deposited films were annealed in air to obtain the the three most stable crystal structures: orthorhombic, tetragonal, and monoclinic.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper reports the synthesis of the novel single-source precursor, [{(MeInAs Bu)}(MeInAs( Bu)H)] and the subsequent first report of aerosol-assisted chemical vapour deposition of InAs thin films. Owing to the use of the single-source precursor, highly crystalline and stoichiometric films were grown at a relatively low deposition temperature of 450 °C. Core level XPS depth profiling studies showed some partial oxidation of the film surface, however this was self-limiting and disappeared on etch profiles.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infects one-third of the world's population and in 2013 accounted for 1.5 million deaths. Fluoroquinolone antibacterials, which target DNA gyrase, are critical agents used to halt the progression from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis to extensively resistant disease; however, fluoroquinolone resistance is emerging and new ways to bypass resistance are required.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF