Proposal of a method to clarify and enhance decision-making at the front-end of innovation

Decision-making at the front-end of innovation is critical for the success of companies. This paper presents a simple visual method, called DMCA (Decision-Making Criteria Assessment), which was created to clarify and improve decision-making at the front-end of innovation. The method maps the uncertainty of project information and importance of decision criteria, compiling a measure that indicates whether the decision is highly uncertain, what information interferes with it, and what criteria are actually being considered. The DMCA method was tested in two projects that faced decision-making issues, and the results confirm the benefits of using this method in decision-making at the front-end. © 2012 IEEE.

La 0.7Ca 0.3MnO 3 / Mn 3O 4 composites: Does an insulating secondary phase always enhance the low field magnetoresistance of manganites

Composites of magnetoresistive La 0.7Ca 0.3MnO 3 (LCMO) with insulating Mn 3O 4 are useful as a model system because no foreign cation is introduced in the LCMO phase by interdiffusion during the heat treatment. Here we report the magnetotransport properties as a function of sintering temperature T sinter for a fixed LCMO/Mn 3O 4 ratio. Decreasing T sinter from 1250 °C to 800 °C causes an increase in low field magnetoresistance (LFMR) that correlates with the decrease in crystallite size (CS) of the LCMO phase. When plotting LFMR at (77 K, 0.5 T) versus 1/CS, we find that the data for the LCMO/Mn 3O 4 composites sintered between 800 °C and 1250 °C follow the same trend line as data from the literature for pure LCMO samples with crystallite size >∼25 nm. This differs from the LFMR enhancement observed by many authors in the usual manganite composites, i.e., composites where the insulating phase contains cations other than La, Ca or Mn. This difference suggests that diffusion of foreign cations into the grain boundary region is a necessary ingredient for the enhanced LFMR. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.

Use of vertically-aligned carbon nanotube array to enhance the performance of electrochemical capacitors

In the domain of energy storage, electrochemical capacitors have numerous applications ranging from hybrid vehicles to consumer electronics, with very high power density at the cost of relatively low energy storage. Here, we report an approach that uses vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays as electrodes in electrochemical capacitors. Different electrolytes were used and multiple parameters of carbon nanotube array were compared: carbon nanotube arrays were shown to be two to three times better than graphite in term of specific capacitance, while the surface functionalization was demonstrated to be a critical factor in both aqueous and nonaqueous solutions to increase the specific capacitance. We found that a maximum energy density of 21 Wh/kg at a power density of 1.1 kW/kg for a hydrophilic electrode, could be easily achieved by using tetraethylammonium tetrafluoroborate in propylene carbonate. These are encouraging results in the path of energy-storage devices with both high energy density and power density, using only carbon-based materials for the electrodes with a very long lifetime, of tens of thousands of cycles. © 2011 IEEE.