Past Events (2020)

The ECS Student Chapter Yamagata and Montreal Joint Symposium was held on 31st of July, 2020 via online tool. ECSYU and Montreal Student Chapter was planned a symposium in 237th ECS meeting, Montreal. However, it was canceled due to COVID-19 outbreak, and then we switch to the virtual joint symposium. 13-hour time difference was a big issue, but eagerness of each side overcome it. It is the first co-hosted activity for both student chapter and consisted of an invited lecture from each side and each student chapter introduction.

 First invited speaker, Professor Hiroyuki Matsui from Yamagata University, Japan gave a lecture entitled “Flexible and Printed Organic Transistors and Their Application to Electrochemical Health Monitors”.  Firstly, he talked about organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) and a concept of wearable printed biosensor using organic semiconductors. Also, he has shown an example for device level test with lactate and lactate oxidase. Currently, he is focusing on “materials informatics” for opt-electronic organic materials, and a lot of DFT calculation result of organic materials were inputted to neural network. And he developed a software which can predict HOMO and LUMO level by just drawing chemical formula, based on the neural network algorithm. Many audiences have interested about it and passionately discussed.

  Second invited speaker, Professor Mickael Dollé from Montreal University, Canada gave a lecture entitled “When todays Li-ion batteries surge can become tomorrow’s solution”. Firstly, he talked about current battery market of lithium-ion battery and recycling technologies of electrode materials. Now he is finding some way to reduce chemical waste for the positive electrode recycling. In the conventional way, high disposal cost by-products were generated. In contrast, the new recycling way he developed can achieved completely closed positive electrode recycling without any waste by-products. Also, he has shown that the recycled lithium ion battery has shown the comparable performance to a commercial cell. That way is testing in large scale demonstration plant. Audiences had interested about some materials detail in recycling method, and there were a lot of questions from audience.

 This symposium was obviously good opportunity to know and stimulate each other. We have confirmed we can communicate and expand community in Electrochemical field beyond with the country border via the online tool even in this tough time.

(Written by Yuya Harada )