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Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries with high theoretical energy density are considered as the most promising devices for rechargeable energy-storage systems. However, their actual applications are rather limited by the shuttle effect of lithium polysulfides (LiPSs) and the sluggish redox kinetics. Here, the boron nitride nanosheets are homodispersedly embedded into N-doping porous carbon fibers (BNNSs/CHFs) by an electrospinning technique and a subsequent

The polysulfides shuttling and slow redox kinetics of sulfur-based cathodes have severely hindered the commercialization of lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries. Herein, distinctive three-dimensional microspheres composed of boron nitride (BN) nanosheets and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) were applied to act as efficient sulfur cathode hosts for the first time using in a spray-drying process. Using this construction, the robust microsphere structure could shorten ion diffusion pathways and supply sufficient spaces to alleviate the volumetric expansion of sulfur during lithiation. Besides, the synergistic effect between BN and rGO significantly enhanced polysulfides adsorption capability and accelerated their conversion, verified by the density functional theory (DFT) calculations and adsorption experiments. Consequently, the S-BN@rGO cathode could manifest the high initial capacity (1137 mAh g-1 at 0.2 C) and remarkable cycling/stability performance (572 mAh g-1 at 1 C after 500 cycles). These results shed light on a design concept of high-performance sulfur cathode host materials.

Highly dispersed and functionalized BNNSs contribute to ultra-stable long life all-solid-state batteries.

The development of highly active, durable and earth-abundant electrocatalysts toward hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is of great significance for promoting hydrogen energy. As one of the most potential substitutes for Pt-based materials, pyrite cobalt selenide (CoSe2) still has shortcomings in terms of HER performance possibly due to its unfavorable hydrogen adsorption characteristics. Metal cation doping has been considered as one of the most available methods to modulate the electronic structure of electrocatalysts. Herein, non-transition metal tin (Sn) doped CoSe2 nanowire arrays grown on carbon cloth have been constructed and fabricated via a simple gas-phase selenization treatment of hydroxide precursor. The successful doping of Sn element into CoSe2 nanowires was confirmed by many experimental results. The as-prepared catalyst shows an obviously enhanced HER performance in alkaline media. Compared with pristine CoSe2, the overpotential of Sn doped catalyst with optimal doping content decreases from 189 mV to 117 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and the Tafel slope declines from 94 mV dec−1 to 86 mV dec−1, as well as shows long-term durability for 100 h. Experimental results and further density functional theory (DFT) calculations show that Sn doping can improve the ability of charge transfer and increase the electrochemical surface area, as well as optimize the hydrogen adsorption energy, all of which are instrumental in HER performance improvement. This work not only provides atomic-level insight into regulating the electronic structure of transition metal selenides by main group metal doping, but also broadens the avenue of developing high-efficiency and stable non-precious metal catalysts.

The development of efficient, stable and low-cost oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts in anodes is essential for the production of hydrogen resources by electrolyzing water. Cobalt hydroxide (α-Co(OH)2) is one of the most encouraging electrocatalysts for the OER under alkaline conditions, but its catalytic activity is still unsatisfactory possibly due to its unfavorable electronic structure. The construction of heterogeneous catalysts has been considered as an effective strategy to change the interface and modulate the electronic structure of electrocatalysts, resulting in improved activities. Herein, novel self-supported α-Co(OH)2 coated Co3O4 nanosheet arrays on conductive carbon cloth have been constructed and fabricated via a simple electrodeposition method (α-Co(OH)2/Co3O4/CC), serving as efficient catalysts for the OER. The as-prepared heterostructure with optimal proportions of α-Co(OH)2 to Co3O4 exhibits an enhanced overpotential of 275 mV at 10 mA cm−2 (322 mV for α-Co(OH)2/CC and 359 mV for Co3O4/CC), a low Tafel slope of 76 mV dec−1 and excellent durability for 22 h. The further electrochemical results show that the formation of heterostructure can optimize the electronic structure of the catalysts through interfacial coupling effect, improve the charge transfer ability and increase the electrochemical active sites, all of which are beneficial to the OER performance enhancement. This work not only develops a highly efficient and stable non-precious metal catalyst toward the OER, but also opens up new ways for boosting the performance by regulating the electronic structure through interface engineering of electrocatalysts and beyond.

Boron nitride (BN) has been widely studied as an efficient catalyst for oxidative propane dehydrogenation (OPDH). Oxygen-containing boron species (e.g., BO·, B(

Funding Information: For financial support, Jukka Niskanen acknowledges the Department of Chemistry of the University of Montreal (Canada), and Jaana Vapaavuori is grateful for funding from Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (Canada). Christian Pellerin acknowledges funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC #RGPIN‐2015‐04014). Dmitri Golberg is grateful to the Australian Research Council (ARC) for granting a Laureate Fellowship FL160100089 and Discovery project DP170100131. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC. Understanding interfacial interactions in polymer systems is crucial for their applicability for instance in adhesives and coatings. Enclosing polymers in a cylindrical volume provides a system for studying interactions dictated by a continuous interfacial layer and a bulk-like volume in the middle of the cylinders. Here, we describe a simple method for enclosing polymers into boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) and establishing the effect of the interfacial interactions on the glass transition temperature (Tg) of the polymers by infrared spectroscopy. The volume of the inner channel is large in comparison to the volume of the loaded polymer coils, allowing the polymer to expand along the inner channel, resulting in the effect of interfacial interactions on polymer dynamics dominating over confinement effects. As examples, we loaded poly(4-vinyl pyridine), poly(methyl methacrylate), poly(vinyl pyrrolidone), and poly(disperse red 1 acrylate) in BNNTs. The strongest interaction between the studied polymer and BNNTswas observed for poly(4-vinyl pyridine), which also caused a significant increase of Tg. In addition to characterizing the effect of interfacial interactions on the thermal transitions of the polymers, this method, which is generalizable to most soluble polymer materials, can be used for studying photoinduced transitions in photoactive polymers thanks to the transparency of the BNNTs at visible wavelengths.

The development of efficient, stable and inexpensive electrochemical water-splitting catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) over a wide range of pH is of great importance for the production of hydrogen resource. Defect engineering with electronic structure modulation has been expected to be an effective strategy to enhance the electrocatalytic activity. Herein, Ni–Co bimetallic sulfide (NiCo2S4) nanosheet arrays with controlled sulfur vacancies have been developed by multiple vulcanization treatment of the Ni–Co hydroxide precursor for HER catalysis at all pH values. The presence of S vacancies has been identified by various characterization means, and their effects on the HER performance are well investigated. The obtained NiCo2S4 nanosheet arrays with optimal sulfur vacancy content exhibit the best HER performance in alkaline medium, only requiring an overpotential of 150 mA at −10 mA cm−2 with a Tafel slope of 82.5 mV dec−1, as well as excellent durability. Experimental results confirm that the high HER activity could be ascribed to the accelerated electron transfer and good intrinsic activity for the electrocatalyst with optimal S vacancies. These findings should provide a new vacancy modulation for traditional transition metal chalcogenides for the purpose of boosting the HER performance at all pH values.

All-inorganic CsPbX3 (X = Cl, Br, I) perovskite quantum dots (QDs) have great potential for various applications due to their excellent photoluminescence properties. However, poor stability under long-term storage hinders their applications. Herein we report the utilization of porous boron nitride nanofibers (BNNFs) as a promising carrier for anchoring of CsPbBr3 QDs. Due to the good dispersion and immobilization of CsPbBr3 QDs, the resulting CsPbBr3/BNNF composites show excellent photostability and superior long-term storage stability in an air environment. Moreover, the CsPbBr3/BNNF composites exhibit an interesting ammonia-responsive behavior: i.e., a distinct decrease in photoluminescence intensity upon exposure to ammonia gas and the subsequent photoluminescence recovery after post-treatment in nitrogen gas. Even after treatment with ammonia gas for 3 h, the composites can still be recovered under nitrogen gas treatment. The fast response, reversibility, and stability of CsPbBr3/BNNF composites in the presence of ammonia gas could inspire a broader range of applications.

Recently, capture and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) has been an effective strategy to address global warming caused by excess CO2. Porous boron nitride (BN) with tunable porosity, excellent chemical stability and thermal stability have been considered as promising materials for CO2 adsorption. Here, porous BN fibers with high specific surface area have been used as promising adsorbent for CO2 capture. The effects of high-temperature treatments in different gaseous ambient on the microstructure evolution and CO2 adsorption capacity of porous BN fibers are studied in detail. Interestingly, the porous BN fibers after high-temperature post-treatment in NH3 gas show enhanced CO2 adsorption capacity, as compared with pristine porous BN and nearly three times more than porous BN nanosheets reported before. The NH3-treatment can effectively restrain the damage of pore structure caused by high-temperature annealing, especially micropores. Moreover, in the NH3-treatment process, the impurities (B-O) of porous BN fibers can react with NH3 to form B-N-H, which is the root cause of the enhancement of CO2 adsorption capacity of porous BN fibers.

Though fluoride is a necessity for human body, excessive intake probably leads to irreversible damages such as dental fluorosis, skeletal fluorosis and lesions of the endocrine glands, thyroid and liver. Herein boron nitride nanosheets (BNNSs) and a series of Al-modified BNNSs (BNNSs-Al-X) with different Al amounts were first prepared to remove superfluous fluoride in aqueous solution. The modified Al was proved to be amorphous Al2O3 on the surface of BNNSs. Batch adsorption results show that both BNNSs and BNNSs-Al-2, which fits pseudo-second-order model well, have high adsorption rate for fluoride. The maximum adsorption capacity calculated by Langmuir model is 50.510 mg/g for BNNSs-Al-2, which is better than vast majority of reported adsorbents. The excellent adsorption capacity of BNNSs-Al-2 could be attributed to the synergy of porous BNNSs and amorphous Al2O3. Primary BNNSs can adsorb fluoride mainly by physical interaction, while chemical adsorption is predominant on the Al-modified BNNSs, which can be deduced from the fitted model and corresponding parameters. All of the above results prove that BNNSs-Al-2, as a promising adsorbent, can play an important role for removal of fluoride in water.

In this paper, a novel type of micropore-rich boron nitride (BN) fibers (m-BNFs) was prepared by adding a surfactant hexamethylenetetramine in the traditional melamine-diborate (M·2B) precursor of conventional porous BN fibers (BNFs). As a result, extra micropore distribution could be introduced within m-BNFs bodies. Due to adding of the micropores, the CO2 capture capacities of the BN fibers were improved to be 2.85 mmol g−1, which were significantly higher than that of original porous BNFs. Also, these m-BNFs would have an enhanced adsorption capacity of methane, the amount of up to 0.71 mmol g−1. At the same time, these new m-BNFs materials showed excellent thermal stability, which would be more valuable for advanced gas adsorption working in a high-temperature environment in the future.

In the development of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN)-based polymeric composites with high thermal conductivity, it is always challenging to achieve a dense filling of h-BN fillers to form a desired high-density thermal transfer network. Here, a series of boron nitride nanosheets (BNNSs)/epoxy resin (EP) bulk composites filled with ultrahigh BNNSs content (65-95 wt %) is successfully constructed through a well-designed mechanical-balling prereaction combined with a general pressure molding method. By means of this method, the highly filled BNNSs fillers are uniformly dispersed and strongly bonded with EP within the composites. As a result, the densely BNNSs-filled composites can exhibit multiple performances. They have excellent mechanical properties, and their maximum compression strength is 30-97 MPa. For a BNNSs/EP composite with filling ultrahigh BNNSs fraction up to 90 wt %, its highly in-plane thermal conductivities (TC) are 6.7 ± 0.1 W m-1 K-1 (at 25 °C) to 8.7 ± 0.2 W m-1 K-1 (200 °C), respectively. In addition, the minimum coefficient of thermal expansion of BNNSs/EP composites is 4.5 ± 1.3 ppm/°C (only ∼4% of that of the neat EP), while their dielectric constants are basically located between 3-4 along with their dielectric loss tangent values exceptionally

The demand for spectrum is becoming more and more intense, Co-time and Co-frequency Full Duplex (CCFD) can effectively improve the efficiency of spectrum utilization, but due to the influence of self-interference in the same frequency band, self-interference cancellation is required. This paper presents a self-interference cancellation method based on digital aided processing in the analog domain, which has strong expansibility, portability and low complexity. Through simulation, the analog domain self-interference cancellation method is adopted to cancel BPSK signal with bandwidth of 2.592 MHz, and the cancellation can be 36.425 dB under ITAP, which is better than the traditional method by 8.3 dB; under 3TAP, it can cancel by 47. 143dB, which is better than the traditional method by 1.891dB. The experimental results show that the proposed method can suppress BPSK modulated signal up to 45.320 dB and single tone signal up to 50.858 dB. The method presented in this paper is conducive to the better application of Co-time and Co-frequency Full Duplex in practical engineering fields and has a wide range of application scenarios.

A novel two-step method is developed for the facile preparation of hollow nano-spherical boron nitride (BN). BN nanospheres prepared by the traditional chemical vapor deposition reaction of ammonia and trimethyl borate were hollowed out. The average size of solid BN nanospheres precursor was ~ 130 nm. Boron nitride phase, morphology, and surface functionalization characterization along with the measurement of O content, and surface functionality were used to illustrate the final differences among various cavitating BN nanospheres treated with different gas flows at a higher temperature. Several possible formation mechanisms for the BN cavitating structures were proposed. This work provides direction for the controllable preparation of hollow-type BN particles.

Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries are one of the most promising high-energy-density storage systems. However, serious capacity attenuation and poor cycling stability induced by the shuttle effect of polysulfide intermediates can impede the practical application of Li-S batteries. Herein we report a novel sulfur cathode by intertwining multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and porous boron nitride fibers (BNFs) for the subsequent loading of sulfur. This structural design enables trapping of active sulfur and serves to localize the soluble polysulfide within the cathode region, leading to low active material loss. Compared with CNTs/S, CNTs/BNFs/S cathodes deliver a high initial capacity of 1222 mAh g-1 at 0.1 C. Upon increasing the current density to 4 C, the cell retained a capacity of 482 mAh g-1 after 500 cycles with a capacity decay of only 0.044 % per cycle. The design of CNTs/BNFs/S gives new insight on how to optimize cathodes for Li-S batteries.

Designing and developing a cost-effective and highly stable hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalyst under alkaline conditions is critical for sustainable energy conversion and storage. Cobalt-based oxides have been considered as ideal HER electrocatalysts and have been intensively studied; however, their catalytic activity is still unsatisfactory. The modulation of electrical conductivity, which limits the catalytic activity of the transition metal cobalt-based oxides, is an effective way to improve the electron transfer efficiency, mass transfer and kinetic process of the HER. Herein, an ultrathin carbon layer coated cobalt(II) oxide nanosheet array grown in situ on carbon cloth was synthesized by a simple two-step method for efficient HER. The obtained interconnected C@CoO nanosheet array possesses lower overpotentials and smaller Tafel slopes than those of bare CoO and shows excellent stability in 20 h long-term stability tests. The ultrathin carbon coated structure provides CoO with enhanced electron transfer efficiency, increased number of active sites and strong structural stability. This work paves an interesting route for boosting the HER performance of oxide-based electrocatalysts through introducing an ultrathin carbon coating for various energy systems in the future.

The exploration of high-performance, cost-effective, and stable electrocatalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is crucial for future energy storage and conversion technologies. Cobalt-based hydroxides and oxides have been considered as ideal OER electrocatalysts and have been intensively studied; however, their catalytic activity is still unsatisfactory. It is known that the interfacial electron and structure engineering of composite electrocatalysts often results in synergistically enhanced catalytic performance. Herein, a self-supported binary heterogeneous catalyst composed of CoFe LDH/Co0.85Se nanosheet arrays vertically grown on carbon cloth has been reported. The heterostructure electrocatalyst exhibits excellent activity for the OER in alkaline electrolyte, requiring an overpotential of only 241 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm−2 with a small Tafel slope of 48 mV dec−1. These performances are significantly better than those of the bare CoFe LDH and Co0.85Se catalysts. Moreover, the composite electrodes exhibit outstanding durability within 40 h of testing. Our further electrochemical results show that the excellent activities of the heterostructure electrodes should be ascribed to the interfacial coupling effect, increased number of activity sites, accelerated electron transfer, and strong structural stability. This work paves an interesting route for boosting the OER performance of oxide-based electrocatalysts by the regulation of electronic structure through introducing non oxide electrocatalysts for various applications.

Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) hydrogel is a promising material possessing good chemical stability, high water absorption, excellent biocompatibility and biological aging resistant. However, the poor mechanical performance of PVA hydrogel limits its applications. Here we report the utilization of one-dimensional (1D) BN nanofibers (BNNFs) as nanofillers into PVA matrix to prepare a novel kind of BNNFs/PVA composite hydrogel via a cyclic freezing and thawing method. For comparison, the composite hydrogels using spherical BN nanoparticles i.e. BN nanospheres (BNNSs) as fillers were also prepared. The mechanical properties, thermal stabilities and swelling behaviors of the composite hydrogels were investigated in detail. Our study indicates that the mechanical properties of the hydrogels can be improved by adding of BNNFs. After loading of BNNFs into PVA with content of 0.5 wt%, the compressive strength of the composite hydrogel increases by 252% compared with that of pure PVA hydrogel. The tensile performance of BNNFs/PVA composite hydrogels has also been improved. Impressive 87.8% increases in tensile strengths can be obtained with 1 wt% BNNFs added. In addition, with the increase of BNNFs content, the thermal stability and the swelling ratio of hydrogels are increased gradually. The swelling ratio of hydrogel increases by 56.3% with only 1 wt% BNNFs added. In comparison, the improvement effects of the BNNS fillers on the mechanical strengths and swelling ratios are much weaker. The enhanced effects of BNNFs can be ascribed to the strong hydrogen bond interaction between BNNFs and PVA. The high aspect ratios of the nanofibers should also be took into account.

Antibiotic pollution in the aquatic environment seriously threatens human health and ecological balance, which violates the trend of sustainable and green development in today's world. Therefore, how to effectively solve the current problem of antibiotic residues in water is highly imminent. Here, we developed CoO modified porous boron nitride fibers (CoO/P-BNFs) by relying on the strong adsorption of polar B–N bonds for cobalt(Ⅱ) to enhance the absorption and removal capacity for chlortetracycline (CTC). The prepared adsorbent was characterized via XRD, FT-IR, XPS, SEM, TEM and BET methods and then the adsorption behavior was explored by batches of experiments. The results indicated that CoO/P-BNFs achieved excellent removal percentage (97.69%) to CTC at 100 mg/L, which far exceeds the P-BNFs (46.08%) and other conventional adsorbents. The kinetics and isotherms could be well described by the pseudo-second-order model and Freundlich model, and the adsorption was a spontaneous exothermic process. In addition, the possible adsorption mechanisms of CTC onto CoO/P-BNFs were mainly π-π and cation-bridge interaction, while other forces such as hydrogen bond, Van de Waals force, electrostatic interaction and pore-filling effect also played an important role. Finally, our research results indicated that CoO/P-BNFs is a promising adsorbent for removing antibiotic contaminants from aquatic environment.

The commercialization of lithium-sulfur (Li-S) battery is primarily hindered by several challenges, including the poor cycling stability derived from the severe shuttling of lithium polysulfides (LiPSs) and sluggish electrode kinetics. Fabricating heterostructure is an increasing strategy to overcome these problems, but the design mechanism is still an open issue. Herein, using the Sc2CO-MXene/h-BN heterostructure as a prototype, we illuminate how the fabrication of heterostructure effectively LiPS conversion and improve sulfur utilization by first principles calculations. Our outcomes highlight that compared with the individual layers, Sc2CO-MXene/h-BN heterostructure exhibits a stronger affinity toward LiPS to suppress the shuttling effect, which is mostly originated from the interlayer polarity in heterostructure. Meanwhile, Sc2CO-MXene/h-BN heterostructure possesses an ultra-low diffusion barrier (0.71 eV) and decomposition barrier (1.29 eV) of Li2S cluster, which balances the catalytic activity and trapping ability toward LiPSs. Further results on the electronic structures indicate that even after LiPSs adsorption, an enhanced electronic conductivity can be achieved by fabricating Sc2CO-MXene/h-BN heterostructure, which is highly desired to stimulate the redox electrochemistry of LiPSs by providing electronic pathways. We believe that the present discovery pioneers the application of Sc2CO-MXene/h-BN as anchoring and catalytic material for Li-S battery can provide a developed insight on the design of heterostructure cathodes in Li-S battery.

The development of highly effective and durable CO2 separation membrane is still a challenge for the carbon capture and storage. Herein, a novel BN nanosheets supported magnetic ionic liquid membrane (BN-SMILM) is constructed by nanoconfining magnetic ionic liquid (MIL) [P6,6,6,14][FeCl4] to the two-dimentional (2D) nanochannels of laminated BN membrane. The 2D nanochannels provide a well support and restricted space for the MIL. The nanoconfinement effect makes the magnetic [FeCl4]- anions align along the center of 2D BN nanochannels, leading to selectively accelerate the CO2 transport. The nanoconfinement effect and CO2 separation mechanism are further explicated by the molecular dynamic simulations. As a result, compared with the polymer supported MIL membrane, the as-prepared BN-SMILM exhibits better CO2 separation performance, with CO2 permeability of about 227 Barrer and CO2/N2 selectivity of 90 that is above the 2008 Robeson upper-bound. The BN-SMILM also presents excellent long-term stability after 7 days operation, revealing the promising applications in CO2 separation. This work provides a new strategy to prepare high-performance supported liquid membrane materials towards practical environmental and energy application.

Boron nitride (BN) bulk adsorbents replace their powder ones, which indeed make up for many shortcomings of BN’s powders in practical adsorption application and become the most promising BN-based multifunctional adsorption materials. However, the difficulty of synthesis greatly limits their development. Here, we prepare a series of highly porous BN foams (BNFs), via a facile compression forming and controllable high-temperature nitriding method. The BNFs have hierarchical pore characteristics, including abundant micropores (~40 vt.%), and various mesopores and macropores (~60 vt.%), while they possess a robust three-dimensional integrality with maximum compression strength up to ~ 2.2 MPa. These properties make the BNFs kinds of desired bulk adsorbents for application in advanced multifunctional adsorption. Firstly, they can capture various gas molecules, including ultrahigh CO2 capacities of ~ 3.05 mmol/g (0 °C) and ~ 1.75 mmol/g (25 °C), naphthalene of ~ 155 wt% (80 °C) and 89 wt% (20 °C), and liquid nitrogen quantity of ~6.6-times weight of their own weight. In addition, the BNFs with a well hydrophobic-lipophilic surface exhibit remarkable adsorption for a wide range of organic reagents and oils, up to very high capacity of 600–1830 wt%, and show high-end permeation-separation and filtration-adsorption application in oil–water systems. Moreover, as a kind of static block adsorbents, the BNFs also have outstanding pollutant adsorption performances for S8 and Li2Sx in organic solvents, and the Ni(II) ions and methylene blue molecules in water. We believe that our new BNFs materials will be of great significance to lead the BN-based bulk adsorbents for continuous application in more sophisticated fields.

We report an organic-inorganic hybrid core-shell nanomaterial obtained by conjugation of an amphiphilic monomethoxy-poly(ethylene glycol)-b-poly(epsilon-caprolactone) diblock copolymer to hydroxylated boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs). The extent of copolymer grafting reached 64% w/w, an exceptionally high value. The hybrid materials exhibit excellent physical stability in water and an outstanding loading capacity (31.3% w/w) for curcumin, a hydrophobic drug. Moreover, they present good compatibility with the Caco2 cell line, a model of intestinal epithelium. Our findings demonstrate the potential of multifunctional hybrid BNNTs to serve as a platform for complex amphiphilic nanoparticle architectures with improved features. (c) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emergency communications will be the key to deal with natural or man-made emergencies. Their prerequisites are the short frame burst under limited resources, as well as reliable bit error rate (BER) performance in low signal to noise ratio (SNR). With respect to short codes, polar codes normally outperform Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes and convolutional codes, which makes them more suitable for the emergency communications. However, the traditional polarcoded receiver either has a large discrepancy between the practical receiving performance and the theoretical one, or has high complexity, which limits its applications for emergency communications. Hence, to adapt to such scenario, in this paper we invoke an iterative mechanism into the receiver and propose a new non-coherent detection module, namely, short polar-coded non-coherent detection (SPND) module, as well as its corresponding detection algorithm, namely, outercode-feedback-innercode (OCFIC) BCJR-based algorithm. The simulations demonstrate that, with the condition of non-coherent channel and of the target BER of 10-5, the performance gap between the noncoherent detection scheme with the proposed SPND module and the coherent counterpart can be reduced to around 1dB. Meanwhile, the SPND module with short polar codes is superior to conventional non-coherent receiver with short LDPC codes, short polar codes and (2,1,7) convolutional codes by 1.2dB, 2.8dB and 3dB, respectively. Hardware implementation of the module is also presented in this paper.

Exploring high efficient transition-metal dichalcogenides catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is important for water-derived hydrogen fuel. Pyrite cobalt disulfide (CoS2) is one of the potential HER catalysts due to its low price and inherent metallicity, but its catalytic activity is still unsatisfactory possibly attributed to the S sites with catalytic inert; hydrogen adsorption on S sites is weak extremely. Metal cation doping has been considered as one of the most available methods to modulate the electronic structure of electrocatalysts. Here, we report non-transition metal tin (Sn) doped CoS2 nanowire arrays grown on carbon cloth (Sn-CoS2/CC) as available catalysts for HER. The Sn-CoS2/CC catalyst with optimal doping concentration not only has an enhanced over potential of 161 mV at 10 mA cm−2, and the Tafel slope is 94 mV dec-1, but also shows good long-term durability in 32 h of testing. Experimental results and further density functional theory (DFT) calculations show that Sn doping can improve the charge transfer ability, enhance electronic conductivity, and arouse the catalytic insert S sites with optimal hydrogen adsorption free energy (ΔGH*). This work investigates a new method to activate the inert sites in metal-compound catalysts for water splitting and beyond through non-transition metal doping.