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This legislation and similar ones in other global regions have helped to greatly reduce emission levels from road transport. However, a massive increase in the number of cars on the road have meant that pollution due to a number of gases and particulate species remains to be a problem. This paper describes an approach based on optical fibre sensors which has shown to be an effective means of measuring the gases and particulates in question by using sensing technologies which are both robust and potentially cost effective such that they may be included as part of an on board monitoring system for the car of the future.

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The polarization hysteresis and current leakage characteristics of bismuth ferrite, BiFeO3 (BFO) thin films deposited by pulsed laser deposition was measured while varying the temperature from 80 - 300 K in increments of 10 K, to determine the feasibility of BFO for capacitive applications in memory storage devices. Data is compared to the performance of prototypic ferroelectric barium strontium titanate, BaxSr1-xTiO3 (BST) under similar conditions. Finding contacts on the BFO samples that exhibited acceptable dielectric properties was challenging; and once identified, the polarization characteristics between them varied greatly. However, the non-uniformity among the contact points within each sample suggests that either the samples were defective (by contamination or growth process), or that the deposition process of the contacts may have undermined the functionality of the devices. Subjected to increasing temperatures, BFO's polarization improved, and though its polarizability was shown to be inferior to BST, the dielectric loss was less.