One the most important archived legal material in the UK is the Supreme Court published judgements and video recordings of court sittings for the decided cases. The impact of Supreme Court published material extends far beyond the parties involved in any given case as it provides landmark rulings on arguable points of law of the greatest public and constitutional importance. However, the recordings of a case are usually very long which makes it both time and effort consuming for legal professionals to study the critical arguments in the legal deliberations. In this research, we summarise the second part of a combined research-industrial project for building an automated tool designed specifically to link segments in the text judgement to semantically relevant timespans in the videos of the hearings. The tool is employed as a User-Interface (UI) platform that provides a better access to justice by bookmarking the timespans in the videos which contributed to the final judgement of the case. We explain how we employ AI generative technology to retrieve the relevant links and show that the customisation of the GPT text embeddings to our dataset achieves the best accuracy for our automatic linking system.

Automatic Linking of Judgements to UK Supreme Court Hearings | VIDEO

Silicon carbide (SiC) power devices operate at high switching frequencies with high voltages and good stabilities owing to their advantages in excellent breakdown field strength, heat dissipation characteristics, and electron saturation velocity, and so on. Therefore, SiC-based systems can achieve a high power density compared to conventional Si-based systems. However, high dv/dt and di/dt accompanied with high-speed switching operations can cause EMI noise issues. Traditional gate drivers cannot actively control such EMI noise problems. This digest proposes an integrated active gate driver (AGD) to solve the noise issues. The proposed AGD controls the switching speed through controllable AGD voltages in real-time according to the system feedbacks such as the DC-link voltage, output current, and device temperature. The proposed AGD enables switching devices to control the switching speed accurately under various system operational conditions. Simulation and experimental results are presented to verify the proposed method.

An Integrated Active Gate Driver for SiC MOSFETs

**Please read the paper on the following link:**

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9204647

**Abstract:**

This paper provides guidelines to design porous silicon layers regarding optimization of small-signal properties in passive structures for RF: insertion loss and cross talk. Results are based on high frequency measurements on 200 mm wafers and electromagnetic simulations up to 40 GHz. Using substrate resistivity below 1 ohm.cm allows the best trade-off with minimized porous silicon thickness.

Influence of Substrate Resistivity on Porous Silicon Small Signal RF Properties

**Please read the paper on the following link:**

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9186848

**Abstract:**

To enable CMOS compatible GaN HEMTs for the next generation of communication systems (5G and beyond), a low gate resistance is of great importance since it directly affects the RF power gain and fMAX of the transistor. In this paper, the impact of various gate-metal stacks on the gate resistance and RF performance of the devices is studied. The optimized Ti-free gatemetal process leads to fMAX enhancement up to ~ 50% for devices scaled down to 0.32μm gate lengths. The gate resistance for the Tshaped gate is modelled from S-parameters and validated on various gate field plate geometries. The tradeoff between the gate resistance and parasitic capacitance in GaN HEMTs is highlighted in this case.

Analysis of Gate Metal Resistance in CMOS Compatible RF GaN HEMTs

Stabilizing the active half-metallic LiO2 as discharge product is an effective approach to reduce the charge overpotential and enhance the stability of Li-O2 batteries. Here we developed a Rh nanoparticle decorated reduced graphene oxide (Rh/rGO) cathode to induce the formation of mixed discharge products of LiO2 and Li2O2. The as-assembled Li-O2 battery exhibited large discharge capacity (16157 mAh/g at 100 mA/g), long cycle life (136 cycles at 100 mA/g with capacity limited to 500 mAh/g) and reduced charge overpotential. The improved battery performance is ascribed to the intermetallic phase LiRh3 that stabilized crystalline LiO2 as substrate. Additionally, the high oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalytic activity of cathode material is determined to be crucial to stabilize crystalline LiO2 even with the presence of LiRh3. These results provide further insight into LiO2 based Li-O2 batteries and potential application of such template-assisted approach.

Rh/rGO stabilized LiO2 as Discharge Product in Lithium Oxygen Battery

Laser-powder bed fusion (L-PBF) of alloys often leads to large, elongated grains, which are the cause for anisotropic mechanical properties and, sometimes, solidification cracking. While grain refinement has been used before in the design of Al alloys for AM in order to avoid these issues, it is much less common in steels. Here, we report that Ti(O,N) is an effective inoculant for ferritic steels, owing to the Baker-Nutting crystallographic orientation relationship and matching lattice constants. We show that this inoculating phase can be added to steel powder ex situ as TiN micro-powder, but that it also can be formed in sub-µm-size in the melt by reaction of the alloying element Ti with nitrogen from the process atmosphere. Thereby, the refining effect can be “switched” by the choice of process gas. By both, in-situ synthesis and ex-situ addition, ultrafine grains with an average diameter just larger than 1 µm and a completely random texture are achieved. We show that this refinement method is effective in several ferritic steels (Fe-Ti, Fe-Al, Fe-Cr) and discuss the required amount of Ti addition. The addition of 5wt.-%Ti to Fe-19wt.-%Cr leads to a doubling of the yield strength and UTS, which we argue is mostly due to the grain refinement by Ti(O,N).

Ultrafine-grained ferritic steels by L-PBF via ex-situ addition or in-situ synthesis of inoculants

Continuous fiber reinforced thermoplastic polymer composites (CFRTP) are becoming more significant in industrial applications because of their unique advantages such as excellent mechanical and chemical performance, light weight, short molding cycle, secondary molding and waste recycling. However, the difficulty in developing CFRTP is how to combine fiber with thermoplastics due to the significant difference in surface property between fiber and thermoplastic matrix. In this work, we presented the method to create the strong interaction between polymer matrix and fiber to improve the interface adhesion. The result from this study indicates that the strength of the CFRTP increase both along and cross fiber direction by introducing the interface interaction. The breaking behavior of the CFRTP suggests the different breaking mechanism of the CFRTP. This method is also applicable for production scale as the interaction was created within second time scale.

Composite resin to enhance interface between matrix and fiber in continuous fiber reinforced thermoplastic composites

The flame retardancy for polymers is very demanding as a lot of polymers are flammable and decompose into small and volatile hydrocarbons upon pyrolysis. In the past, most effective flame retardants for polymers are halogen-based. With the increasing regulatory requirements on safety and environments, halogen-based flame retardants are gradually being replaced with non-halogenated flame retardants. Inorganic metal hydroxides, mainly aluminum hydroxide (ATH) and magnesium hydroxide (MDH), are the largest class of flame retardants by volume. Other non-halogenated flame retardants, such as phosphorus-, nitrogen- and silicon-based, show promises for this property. The up-to-date technique gaps are: (1) for inorganic flame retardants, high loading of 40 - 60 wt% is required, leading to worse mechanical properties and heavy weight, (2) for current non-halogenated ones, most of them are small molecules. Such small flame retardant molecules have relatively poor thermal stability and mechanical strength, and will slowly leach out from the composites surface, leading to performance deterioration and possible environmental pollution. The development of new flame retardants with higher efficacy, lower loading, higher strength and high stability are therefore in need. Targeting this, we have developed new flame retardants with polymeric nature, which theoretically possess the above advantages over the current ones, and demonstrated their effectiveness in various polymers like polypropylene, polyamide. The flame retardant long chains will entangle with polymer matrix chains, stabilizing the whole composites without leaching issues.

Polymeric Flame Retardants: a Promising Category for Enhanced Performance

Electrospinning of Whey Protein Isolate Nanofibers as Plastics Substitution

Applications of fiber-reinforced composites in engineering structures sometimes require joining with other materials such as metal components or other composites. Various joining methods such as adhesive bonding and bolting can be adopted depending on the required loading conditions, types of materials, surface conditions, and environmental factors. This study aims to model and analyze mechanical joints between carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite plates with metallic materials under out-of-plane load. Conical metallic inserts are used to transfer the load to the composite plate. The influence of the insert geometry and the adhesion parameters to the strength of the joint were studied. It should be noted that in reality the adhesion parameters, which include the strength and toughness of the interface between the composite surface and the metallic insert, can potentially be modified by using various surface treatments to the metallic insert. The results show that both the geometry of the insert and the adhesion parameters influences the strength of the joint, indicating that the mechanism of load transfer is not only through mechanical locking between the two but also through their adhesion.

Analysis of hybrid joints between carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite plates and metallic inserts

Synthesis of magnetic nanoparticles for rapid quantification of mycotoxins and pesticide residue in foods

Marine degradation polymers seems like a promising substitute to existing plastics issues. Beside the cost issue, the lower thermal stability also cause processing challenges. The CML aims to connect the different stakeholders and find the next generation of plastics materials.

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Automatic Linking of Judgements to UK Supreme Court Hearings | VIDEO

An Integrated Active Gate Driver for SiC MOSFETs

Influence of Substrate Resistivity on Porous Silicon Small Signal RF Properties

Analysis of Gate Metal Resistance in CMOS Compatible RF GaN HEMTs

Rh/rGO stabilized LiO2 as Discharge Product in Lithium Oxygen Battery

Ultrafine-grained ferritic steels by L-PBF via ex-situ addition or in-situ synthesis of inoculants

Composite resin to enhance interface between matrix and fiber in continuous fiber reinforced thermoplastic composites

Polymeric Flame Retardants: a Promising Category for Enhanced Performance

Electrospinning of Whey Protein Isolate Nanofibers as Plastics Substitution

Analysis of hybrid joints between carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite plates and metallic inserts

Synthesis of magnetic nanoparticles for rapid quantification of mycotoxins and pesticide residue in foods

Development of Marine Biodegradation Testing Capability and Materials

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