Safety handbook on Dept. Web pages
As part of our safety legal obligations please can you read the safety handbook, which is on the Physics Dept. web pages. Then print off the front page, sign to say you have understood it and return signed form to Grainne Wilkinson’s pigeon hole. Thank you.
Shonah Ion
Safety Induction
The next induction will take place on the 2nd November at 2:30 pm in A27 Physics. Any new members of staff, post-doctoral researchers or anyone who wants a refresher please come along with a pen.
Shonah Ion
Facilities has informed us of the following works for the Physics building
Water Hygiene and Shower head cleaning in Physics will take place week commencing 30.10.2017 from 9am daily.
Two Lancaster University engineers will require access to kitchens and shared bathrooms to test hot water temperatures. The engineers will not test every kitchen/bathroom just a sample from different locations within the building. This brief survey will take approximately five minutes, and is to ensure that the hot water is maintained at the correct temperature to prevent any instances of legionella. There will be no shutdown of service.
Shonah Ion
IOP – Early Career Members Town Meeting
Early Career Members Town Meeting
De Vere West One, 9-10 Portland Place,
London, UK
27 October 2017
Early-career members are invited to attend this exciting town meeting to shape an IOP special-interest group to support members working across the whole community, in academia, business and education. The proposed group will enable early-career members to build a network of peers, develop an effective mentoring scheme and to ensure that members understand the different career options available to them as well providing access to the development of vital skills.
Attending the town meeting will enable you to:
• Be inspired by a panel of leaders who have experienced different career paths across academia, business and education.
• Identify barriers for early-career members and help shape the group to meet your needs
• Connect with likeminded early-career members
• Get the opportunity to be actively involved Invited panel members include:
• Becky Parker MBE CPhys Hon.FInstP, Director, Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS)
• Professor Stephen Watts, Heads of School, The University of Manchester
• Sally Williams, Head of People, CSR Group
If you are interested in attending but cannot because of your geographical location the afternoon session will be livestreamed on YouTube. Please indicate on the registration form if you would like to take part through this format.
View the programme and register to attend
Grainne Wilkinson
Ageing of large Li-ion battery cells
Energy Seminar: Friday 27th October 11.30-13.00, FST Training and Development Centre, A76 Science and Technology Building
Dr. Rakel Wreland Lindström (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
The reduction of carbon dioxide and air pollutants emissions from the transport sector require significantly enhanced energy efficiency in the vehicle powertrain, something that can be reached by increased electrification. Li-ion batteries are currently the choice of automotive industry. However, the use of Li-ion batteries in electric vehicles is demanding, requiring high energy and power density, safety and longevity. At the same time the system must be able to compete in cost with other powertrain solutions.
To reduce the overall cost of electrical vehicles it is of the major industrial and societal interest to increase the lifetime of the battery. One way to go is to optimize the usage for maximal utilisation with minimal ageing, but this requires a better knowledge on how, when, where and why the cell degrades and how measurable indicators, such as impedance rise or loss of capacity, are coupled to the various degradation mechanisms observed. This talk will focus on ageing issues of large cells for vehicle applications. The influence of high charging rates and state of charge will be addressed as well as inhomogeneous ageing. Finally, the effect of pressure and pressure distribution on performance and ageing will be discussed.
For further details please contact Harry Hoster.
Please confirm attendance for catering purposes. There will be tea, coffee and cakes served from 11.30. You can register here
(https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ageing-of-large-li-ion-battery-cells-tickets-39039045837).
The presenter
Dr Wreland Lindström has worked at the Div. Applied Electrochemistry, Dept. Chemical Engineering, at KTH Royal Institute of Technology since 2007 and is Associate Professor since 2014. She has a PhD-degree in Inorganic Chemistry (Atmospheric Corrosion) from Göteborg University from 2003 and has had postdoc positions at the surface chemistry groups at Paris-Tech and at University of Ulm. Today her major interest is in Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells and Li-ion batteries. Her research especially addresses performance and durability issues of these cells for automotive applications.
Lefteris Danos
Physics Christmas lunch – Thursday 21st December
The Physics Christmas lunch will take place at 1300hrs on Thursday 21st December at Greaves Park, Lancaster. Please see details of the menu at http://greavespark.co.uk/christmas-fayre-menu/
To secure your place please pay me and I’ll take your menu choices at the same time. The cost is £15.95 for two courses for £20.50 for three courses. It would be great if you could try and bring something like the right amount of money although I could try and offload some of my old £1 coins!
I need your menu choices by Weds 6 December COP at the very latest.
Gráinne Wilkinson
Astrophysics Seminar – Supernovae – 24th Oct
Title: The physical properties of stripped-envelope supernovae and the connection to their progenitors and compact remnants
Speaker: Simon Prentice (Liverpool John Moores University)
Time: 3pm on 24th October 2017
Venue: Physics C36
Abstract:
Stripped-envelope supernovae (SE-SNe) are a subset of core-collapse supernovae where the progenitor star has experienced severe mass loss during its evolution. The resulting pre-explosion star contains little or no hydrogen or helium at the moment of core-collapse, and this is visible in its photometric and spectroscopic evolution. They are an important component in the evolution of their local galactic environment and are the primary source of neutron star/black hole binaries in the Universe. However, despite being first identified as a distinct category in the 1980s it is only now that we are beginning to be build samples of sufficient size to investigate the populations properties.
In this talk I will present the results of analysis on the largest sample of SE-SNe to dates, which indicates that these SNe have considerable diversity across mass, kinetic energy, specific kinetic energy, luminosity, temporal characteristics, and host environment. These results will then be linked back to some of the key questions in the field; what kind of progenitors give rise to these events and what kind of evolutionary pathways are available? How is mass lost and is there an indication as to the time-scales involved? How do SE-SNe link with other CC-SNe, superluminous-SNe, gamma-ray bursts, and strong sources of gravitational waves?
Steven Williams
Departmental safety documentation storage
One of the recommendations from our University safety audit was to have a central store of all the risk and COSHH assessments etc. To this end early next week, all staff will receive an invitation to share a Box folder called Departmental safety files.
There are 4 folders within, Travel, Teaching, Research and Workshop & Technical. I have listed some sub folders with the divisions in the research space but if you want to create your own group or project file please do so.
Please upload your safety documentation into an appropriate file for reference and to ensure compliance with the University’s polices.
Shonah Ion
Compulsory health and Safety training
All members of the University are required to complete a basic on line health and safety training. The link is for the front page of the University health and Safety web pages. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/depts/safety/index.html and the course is under the Moodle section.
Shonah Ion
Postgraduate & Staff football
Now that the new academic year is upon us, postgraduate and staff football session will be starting up again. The team plays with the undergraduates in the winter months, sessions are £1 to play, on Wednesday evenings at 6:30pm on the far astroturf pitches (see online campus map for location).
For weekly reminders you can either join the emailing list by emailing myself at s.malzard1@lancaster.ac.uk or by sending a request to the “Lancaster Physics Postgrad Sport” group on Facebook. If you have any other queries please email the address above.
Simon Malzard
Location of current safety forms.
A recommendation from the recent safety audit of the Department was to ensure everybody knows where the current blank safety forms are located. They are found on the University safety web pages at http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/depts/safety/index.html . These can be found by looking under safety in any of the University A-Z indexes. All safety form templates can be found here, usually at the end of the individual guidance i.e. risk assessment, COSHH etc. The link on the Physics web site will be updated to reflect this.
Shonah Ion