Nonequilibrium Anion Detection in Solid-Contact Ion-Selective Electrodes.

Low-cost and portable nitrate and phosphate sensors are needed to improve farming efficiency and reduce environmental and economic impact arising from the release of these nutrients into waterways. Ion selective electrodes (ISEs) could provide a convenient platform for detecting nitrate and phosphate, but existing ionophore-based nitrate and phosphate selective membrane layers used in ISEs are high cost, and ISEs using these membrane layers suffer from long equilibration time, reference potential drift, and poor selectivity. In this work, we demonstrate that constant current operation overcomes these shortcomings for ionophore-based anion-selective ISEs through a qualitatively different response mechanism arising from differences in ion mobility rather than differences in ion binding thermodynamics.

Iterative reverse Monte Carlo and molecular statics for improved atomic structure modeling: a case study of zinc oxide grown by atomic layer deposition.

Reverse Monte Carlo (RMC) modeling is a common method to derive atomic structure models of materials from experimental diffraction data. However, conventional RMC modeling does not impose energetic constraints and can produce non-physical local structures within the simulation volume. Although previous strategies have introduced energetic constraints during RMC modeling, these approaches have limitations in computational cost and physical accuracy.