ECS Transactions

The purpose of this article is to examine school-based interventions that have been designed and developed to promote students' happiness, well-being, and academic achievement using a positive psychology approach that focuses on cultivating positive emotions, resilience, and positive character strengths. The current paper outlines the positive psychology movement and reviews evidence from 12 school-based positive psychology interventions that have been systematically evaluated, in response to calls from the 21^st century education movement for schools to incorporate students' happiness and well-being as a focus of learning. The findings of this research shows that positive psychology programs are linked to students' health, relationships, happiness, and academic success. The article offers recommendations for additional development of positive psychology interventions in schools, and explores those factors and variables that may influence positive psychology interventions to be extended and more systematically integrated into schools for happiness and well-being of students.

The aim of this paper is to investigate sustainable education and positive psychological interventions in schools towards achievement of sustainable happiness and well-being for 21^st century pedagogy and curriculum. The growing awareness that sustainability, happiness, and well-being are intertwined takes the discussion of happiness and sustainability to newer levels. Even though scholars and governments are now grappling with questions about policies for sustainability, happiness, and well-being, the general public may not be aware of these connections and none of these topics are well integrated into formal education. Nevertheless, the necessity for transforming education to play a leading role in sustainable education has never been more imperative, and thus it has been taken up extensively in this paper. The concept of sustainable happiness offers an innovative perspective to reinvigorate sustainability education and shape priorities for 21^st century learning: contributing to resilient, sustainable happiness and well-being for all. The education sector, however, is conservative and slow to adapt. The author recommends that happiness should be an aim of education, and a good education should contribute significantly towards personal and collective happiness. Broadening this recommendation to consider sustainable happiness and well-being for all is an overarching aim that could assist to reimagine the role of education in the 21^st century and serve as the foundation for setting new priorities.

This research examines how transformative learning has been conceptualized and operationalized in education for sustainable development (ESD) and sustainability learning, and gathers evidence on how to promote transformative learning in formal and non-formal settings. The author performed a systematic literature review to create a bibliometric overview that combines a quantitative description of the body of literature with a qualitative study of the learning processes, results, and circumstances. The current investigation shows that transformative learning theory may help in designing and implementation of educational interventions and evaluations of learning towards sustainability by analyzing the learning process, results, and circumstances in the core sample of studies. This systematic review allows for a better understanding of how transformative learning theory's concepts and mechanisms are operationalized in sustainability learning and ESD research, and it serves as a source of encouragement for researchers and practitioners working to make sustainability education, teaching, and learning more transformative.

The Distribution of Relaxation Times (DRT) is an important analytical tool that is capable of giving initial information from Electrochemical Impedance Spectra (EIS) with respect to the number of relaxation processes occurring in the system and their corresponding relaxation frequencies. The DRT transformation with the Tikhonov regularization is used for analysis of EIS data obtained from the characterization Solid Oxide Fuel and Electrolysis Cells (SOFC/SOEC) operating at high temperatures. The effects of this transformation together with occurring pitfalls on the most commonly implemented circuit elements used to describe EIS data was investigated to gain a better understanding. The behavior of the DRT transformation as a function of the individual circuit elements is reported, the regularization parameter λ is taken as a sweep parameter to investigate its influence and optimal ranges for the selection of λ are presented.

Melanin is a biological organic polymer and has semiconductor properties. The structure of organic semiconductors, including melanin, determines the mechanism of their conductivity, electrical, and catalytic properties. Research the properties of melanin, which are synthesized on the basis of innovative technologies developed by Sunoil-Agro, confirms the innovating prospects for using melanin with goal to modify electrodes of Li-ion batteries. Results of investigation and developed the method modification the cathode materials of Li-ion batteries are presented in this article. The goal is to increasing the energy and power characteristics of LiMn₂O₄-based cathodes as a result of their modification with melanin.

The Danish Energy Agency has sponsored a 4 million € project for production of ammonia synthesis gas and the use of ammonia by Solid Oxide Cells. The purpose of the project is to demonstrate a novel process for generation of ammonia synthesis gas without an air separation unit by means of Solid Oxide Electrolyzer Cells as well as using ammonia as a fuel for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells. The synthesis gas generation plant will be a 50 kW unit. The SOFC unit test will be carried out on one stack corresponding to 1.5 kW. In parallel socio- as well as techno-economic studies will be performed on ammonia as an energy vector for storing excess electricity and using it for shipping, heavy duty transport and stationary power production. The paper and presentation will provide details about the new synthesis gas production process and present experimental results from the ammonia to power part of the project.

The article discusses the possible applications of social robots in education, the technological and pedagogical challenges they possess, and the ways in which they may affect learning outcomes, concentrating only on robots intended to assist students in learning via social interaction. Author has highlighted three significant research problems : 1) Does robot tutors help improve students' learning outcomes? 2) Does appearance and behaviour of robots have a significant role to play on academic engagement of learners? 3) What could be the potential roles of a robot in an educational setting? A statistical meta-analysis of previously published research articles is used to substantiate author's claims. The larger aim of this article is to provide effective groundwork for future research by describing the expected outcomes of using social robots to offer education and identifying potential research areas for further inquiry.

In this study, we provide an overview regarding our recent finding on the mechanism, activity and particle size effect for the hydrogen oxidation and evolution reaction (HOR/HER) on Pt-group metal electrodes, under both acid and alkaline conditions. We show that there is an activity decrease of about two orders of magnitude when going from acid to base conditions on electrodes which are able to form a H-UPD layer like Pt, Ir, Pd and Rh. Similarities in the HOR/HER process between acid and base conditions have been found: the rate determining step, which has been identified by means of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy measurements to be the Volmer reaction, remains the same and there is no particle size dependency on the reactivity of Pt electrodes. In the light of these finding, Volcano plots of the HOR/HER activities in acid and base have been proposed.

This paper addresses the opportunities and challenges of wet and dry selective etches in the integration of gate-all-around (GAA) field-effect transistor (FET), which is emerging as a promising solution to replace FinFET for the advanced logic devices. For the GAA device fabrication, a quintessential challenge is a controlled isotropic etching of dielectrics, semiconductors, and metals with high selectivity to the exposed materials. In this paper, the significance of the unit process modules in the GAA device integration: shallow trench isolation (STI), inner spacer formation, replacement metal gate (RMG) and self-aligned interconnect in the middle-of-line (MOL) and the back-end-of-line (BEOL), will be discussed.

A zero-dimensional stationary model for the I-U characteristics of anode-supported solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) is presented. The different kinds of electrode polarization resistances are separated from experimental impedance data by means of a detailed equivalent circuit model specified for anode-supported cells. This has the big advantage that partial pressure and temperature dependency of electrode exchange current densities could be determined by a fit of semi-empirical power law model equations. For the first time, the exponents a and b for the pH2- and pH2O-dependency of the anodic exchange current density are obtained independently. Equally, the exponent m for the pO2-dependency of the cathodic exchange current density is derived. The anodic and cathodic gas diffusion polarization is calculated without the estimation of parameters such as tortuosity and porosity. Our approach is advantageous to separate anodic and cathodic activation and diffusion polarization and precisely predicts I-U characteristics for a wide operating range.