Issue 30 – November 1st, 2023

Johanna Weker, leader of a research group at the Stanford University synchrotron light laboratory (SSRL), was in Campinas in July on a technical visit led by Prof. Gustavo Doubek (Unicamp), researcher at CINE. At Unicamp, she visited laboratories and the headquarters of CINE and gave a seminar on the characterization of lithium-ion battery degradation mechanisms. The scientist also visited Sirius (the Brazilian synchrotron light laboratory). Members of CINE’s Advanced Energy Storage (AES) division maintain a scientific collaboration with the SSRL researcher to characterize batteries under operating conditions.

A team of representatives from CINE, Shell and the company Oninn visited at the beginning of August the research center Fotovoltaica at UFSC, which is coordinated by Prof Ricardo Rüther. The visit took place within a collaborative project on perovskite solar cells with the objective of studying perovskite solar modules under super-irradiance, a relatively common condition in Brazil that can have deleterious consequences on photovoltaic systems. To do this, the panels were subjected to outdoor tests at Fotovoltaica, which has an ideal infrastructure for this type of study.

Within the same project, a group from CINE visited the headquarters of Oninn in Belo Horizonte at the end of September. The purpose of the visit was to monitor the development of flexible perovskite solar modules. With funding from Shell and coordination by Prof. Rüther, the project brings together teams from Fotovoltaica, Oninn and the Dense Energy Carriers (DEC) division at CINE, which is headed by Profa. Ana Flavia Nogueira (Unicamp).

CINE members are part of the world ranking of of top-cited scientists that was published in early October by John Ioannidis, from Stanford University (USA), in partnership with Elsevier. Juarez L. F. Da Silva (IQSC-USP), Ana Flavia Nogueira (Unicamp) and Caue Ribeiro (Embrapa Instrumentação), who are part of the current body of CINE members, are included both on the lists of career-long and single recent year (2022) impact. In total 210,198 scientists from all over the world are present in the ranking, 1,294 of which are from Brazil. The work considers a set of citation metrics, such as number of citations, h-index, hm-index adjusted for co-authorship, citations of articles in different authorship positions and a composite indicator (c-score). Based on these metrics, taken from Elsevier’s Scopus database, the ranking displays the 100,000 most impacting scientists of all knowledge areas, and the 2% in each field.

Prof. Ana Flavia Nogueira (Unicamp) and Prof. Juarez L. F. Da Silva (IQSC-USP) participated in Bangalore (India) in the Shell conference that brought together, on October 4th and 5th, experts in experimental and computational methods, and artificial intelligence to discuss how these tools can accelerate the energy transition. The director of CINE gave a talk about the work carried out at the center since its creation in 2018. Prof. Juarez, head of CINE’s Computational Materials Science and Chemistry division, participated in a panel discussion on the future of experimentation, in which he spoke about the role of various computational tools in the discovering and design of materials for specific applications.

A call for papers is open until November 15th for research papers, reviews e perspectives addressing materials and devices for the energy transition in Latin America and the challenges of taking these technologies to an industrial scale. The accepted articles will be published in a thematic collection of Materials Advances (RSC) aimed at a broad audience of researchers, industry professionals and policymakers. The three editors of the collection are CINE researchers: Prof. Ana Flavia Nogueira (Unicamp), Prof. Gustavo Doubek (Unicamp) and Prof. Hudson Zanin (Unicamp).