Welcome to the Amira-Avizo Software Use Case Gallery

Our team is developing a modern, cross-disciplinary approach to documentation and preservation of astromaterials, specifically lunar and meteorite samples stored at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility.

Apollo Lunar Sample 60639, collected as part of rake sample 60610 during the 3rd Extra-Vehicular Activity of the Apollo 16 mission in 1972, served as the first NASA preserved lunar sample to be examined by our team in the development of a novel approach to int... Read more

Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that convert the chemical energy of fuels into electrical energy. An ideal option for a wide variety of portable, stationary, and automotive applications is using the polymer electrolyte
fuel cells due to their modular design, high efficiency, and environmental benefits.

A 3D microstructure of the non-woven gas diffusion layers (GDLs) of polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFCs) is reconstructed using a stochastic method. For a commercial GDL, ... Read more

Catalyst aging effects were analyzed using X-ray absorption micro-computed tomography in combination with conventional characterization methods on various length scales ranging from nm to μm to gain insight into deactivation mechanisms.

For this purpose, a 4 wt% Pt/Al₂O₃ model exhaust gas catalyst was coated on a cordierite honeycomb and subjected to sequential thermal aging in static air at 950 °C for 4, 8, 12 and 24 hours. The ag... Read more

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) offers a possible solution to curb the CO₂ emissions from stationary sources in the coming decades, considering the delays in shifting energy generation to carbon neutral sources such as wind, solar and biomass.

The most mature technology for post-combustion capture uses a liquid sorbent, amine scrubbing. However, with the existing technology, a large amount of heat is required for the regeneration of the liquid sorbent, which... Read more

Mass transport can significantly limit the rate of reaction and lead to concentration polarization in electrochemical devices, especially under the conditions of high operating current density.

In this study we investigate hierarchically structured micro-tubular solid
oxide fuel cells (MT-SOFC) fabricated by phase inversion technique and quantitatively assess the mass transport and electrochemical performance improvement compared to a conventional tubular SOFC. We present pioneer... Read more

Composite cathodes comprising nanoscale
powders are expected to impart with high specific surface
area and triple phase boundary (TPB) density, which will lead
to better performance.

However, uniformly mixing nanosized heterophase powders remains a challenge due to their high surface energy and thus ease with which they agglomerate into their individual phases during the mixing and sintering
processes. In this study, we successfully synthesized La0.6Sr0.4Co0.2Fe... Read more

This study aims to correlate the active triple phase boundaries (TPBs) to the variation of as-prepared anode microstructures and Ni densifications based on the reconstructed 3D volume of an SOFC anode, providing a point of comparison with theoretical studies that reveal the relationship of TPBs and the material microstructure using randomly packed spheres models.

Nickel/zirconia-based nanostructured electrodes for solid oxide fuel cells suffer from poor stability even at intermediate temperature.

This study quantifies the electrochemical and microstructural degradation of nanostructured electrodes by combining 3D tomography, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and mechanistic modeling. For the first time, the electrochemical degradation of nanostructured electrodes is quantified according to the fractal nature of the three-phase bounda... Read more

A simple chemical bath deposition is used to coat a complex porous ceramic scaffold with a conformal Ni layer.

The resulting composite is used as a solid oxide fuel cell electrode, and its electrochemical response is measured in humidified hydrogen. X‐ray tomography is used to determine the microstructural characteristics of the uncoated and Ni‐coated porous structure, which include the surface area to total volume, the radial pore size, and the size of the necks between the pores.... Read more

This paper used the X-ray three-dimensional (3D) microscope and acquired, through CT scanning, the 3D data of the long-frame coal sample from the Daliuta Coal Mine.

Then, the 3D datacube reconstructed from the coal’s CT scanning data was visualized with the use of Avizo, an advanced visualization software. By means of a gray-scale segmentation technique, the model of the coal’s micro-pore structure was extracted from the object region, and the precise characterization was then cond... Read more

The most common means of fabricating membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) for polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFCs) involves a hot-press step. The conditions used to perform the hot-press impacts the performance and durability of the fuel cell.

However, the hot-press process is not essential for achieving operational MEAs and some practitioners dispense with the hot-press stage altogether by using a self-assembled approach. By performing the integration of the components in-situ durin... Read more

Multiphase flow in porous media is strongly influenced by the wettability of the system, which affects the arrangement of the interfaces of different phases residing in the pores.

We present a method for estimating the effective contact angle, which quantifies the wettability and controls the local capillary pressure within the complex pore space of natural rock samples, based on the physical constraint of constant curvature of the interface between two fluids. This algorithm is ... Read more

The prevailing electrode fabrication method for lithium-ion battery electrodes includes calendering at high pressures to densify the electrode and promote adhesion to the metal current collector.

However, this process increases the tortuosity of the pore network in the primary transport direction and imposes severe tradeoffs between electrode thickness and rate capability. With the aim of understanding the impact of pore tortuosity on electrode kinetics, and enabling cell designs with ... Read more

Ni-YSZ anodes for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells are vulnerable to microstructural damage during redox cycling leading to a decrease in the electrochemical performance.

• Quantification of redox damage by coupling 3D tomography, EIS and nanoindentation.
• YSZ fracture, Ni detachment and agglomeration led to irreversible mechanical damage.
• Ni nanoparticles obtained upon redox cycling improve electrochemical performance.
• Loss in TPB densi... Read more

Electrospun all-fiber flexible supercapacitor with nanofiber electrodes/separator.

• Increased graphitic degree with the addition of MnACAC and thermal decomposition.
• Enhanced capacitive performance with the addition of MnO.
• Quantified nanofiber alignment and increased bias with MnO over undoped fibers.
• FIBSEM tomography of nanofibers showing MnO disitribution in carbon nanofibers.

We present an all-fiber flexible supercapacitor with compo... Read more

Composite membranes with defective metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) connect the emerging fields of MOF topological modification, MOF-polymer interfacial engineering and composite material functionalization.

Although defective MOFs can be fabricated via thermal or chemical treatment, the relationship between hierarchical MOF structure and their performance in a polymeric membrane matrix has so far not been investigated. Here we show how a modula... Read more

Our parametric study shows that increasing the porosity in the spongy layer beyond 10% enhances the effective transport parameters of the spongy layer at an exponential rate, but linearly for the full anode. For the first time, local and global mass transport properties are correlated to the microstructure, which is of wide interest for rationalizing the design optimization of SOFC electrodes and more generally for hierarchical materials in batteries and membranes.

Proton conductivity of the polymer electrolyte membranes in fuel cells dictates their performance and requires sufficient water management. Here, we report a simple, scalable method to produce well-dispersed transition metal carbide nanoparticles. We demonstrate that these, when added as an additive to the proton exchange Nafion membrane, provide significant enhancement in power density and durability over 100 hours, surpassing both the baseline Nafion and platinum-containing recast Nafion ... Read more

In this study, a series of alumina hollow fibers have been prepared with varied polymer binder (polyethersulfone, PESf) concentration and new polymer-based internal coagulant (aqueous solution of polyvinyl alcohol, PVA). For the first time, the micro-channels were characterized in 3D using X-ray CT to determine micro-channel densities and diameters in the radial direction, as well as the 2D measurement of the pore size in the sponge-like layer.

We had proposed an image-processing scheme using union operation suitable for extracting target features with hierarchical dimensions from the original data, and applied it to void analysis in a composite electrode of an all-solid-state lithium ion battery (LIB). Void analysis is very important in developing better composite electrodes for all-solid-state LIBs because internal voids should increase the interfacial resistance. Film formation of electrode-solid electrolyte composites by the aer... Read more