Helping educational providers deliver a better service is the aim behind the world’s first international management system standard for the sector just published.

28 April is World Day for Safety and Health at Work. Celebrated under the auspices of the International Labour Organization (ILO), whose recent statistics suggest that 2.78&nbspmillion people die from…

If the future of work is all about employee experience1), what about the workplace? The need to keep on top of the ever-changing trends in how and where people work makes facility management an essential…

Human waste safely transformed into useful resources such as clean drinking water? Seems inconceivable, yet work is underway to develop international guidance to help new technologies flourish, starting…

Keeping kids free from harm is the effect of ISO’s widely used International Standard for toy safety. And it has just been updated to ensure it covers all bases.

The status, concepts and challenges toward catalysts free of platinum group metal (pgm) elements for proton-exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) are reviewed. Due to the limited reserves of noble metals in the Earth’s crust, a major challenge for the worldwide development of PEMFC technology is to replace Pt with pgm-free catalysts with sufficient activity and stability. The priority target is the substitution of cathode catalysts (oxygen reduction) that account for more than 80% of pgms in current PEMFCs. Regarding hydrogen oxidation at the anode, ultralow Pt content electrodes have demonstrated good performance, but alternative non-pgm anode catalysts are desirable to increase fuel cell robustness, decrease the H₂ purity requirements and ease the transition from H₂ derived from natural gas to H₂ produced from water and renewable energy sources.

The post Toward Platinum Group Metal-Free Catalysts for Hydrogen/Air Proton-Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells appeared first on Johnson Matthey Technology Review.

Health for all is the theme of the World Health Organization’s World Health Day, and a new ISO committee recently formed aims to help.

Historically, Johnson Matthey has had a long association with electrochemistry, and perhaps this was inevitable because of the importance of the platinum group metals (pgm) to Johnson Matthey’s early development. Platinum, in particular, has been incredibly useful in the field, because of its exceptional electrocatalytic activity and impressive inertness in most environments. Famously, Johnson Matthey…

The post Guest Editorial appeared first on Johnson Matthey Technology Review.

The average lifespan of businesses is shrinking, yet some have been around for hundreds of years. How to stay afloat in a rapidly changing world? A newly published standard aims to help.

The down-scaling of nanoelectronic devices to ever smaller dimensions and greater performance has pushed silicon-based devices to their physical limits. Much effort is currently being invested in research to examine the feasibility of replacing Si by a higher mobility semiconductor, such as germanium, in niche high-performance metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) devices. Before Ge can be adopted in industry, a suitable contact material for the active areas of a transistor must be identified. It is proposed that platinum group metal (pgm) germanides be used for this purpose, in a similar manner as metal silicides are used in Si technology. Implementation of Ge-based technology requires a thorough understanding of the solid-state interactions in metal/Ge systems in order to foresee and avoid problems that may be encountered during integration. We present a systematic study of the solid-state interactions in germanide systems of four of the pgms: iridium, platinum, palladium and rhodium. Our approach was essentially twofold. Firstly, conventional thin film couples were used to study the sequence of phase formation in the germanide systems. Conventional thin film couples were also used to identify and monitor the dominant diffusing species during the formation of some of the germanides as these can influence the thermal stability of a device. Secondly, we observed and analysed several aspects of the lateral diffusion reactions in these four systems, including activation energies and diffusion mechanisms. Lateral diffusion couples were prepared by the deposition of thick rectangular islands of one material on to thin films of another material. Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS) and microprobe-Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (μRBS) were used to analyse several aspects of the thin film and lateral diffusion interactions respectively. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were also employed.

The post Inter-Diffusion of Iridium, Platinum, Palladium and Rhodium with Germanium appeared first on Johnson Matthey Technology Review.