For the proper design and evaluation of next‐generation lithium‐ion batteries, different physical‐chemical scales have to be considered. Taking into account the electrochemical principles and methods that govern the different processes occurring in the battery, the present review describes the main theoretical electrochemical and thermal models that allow simulation of the performance of lithium‐ion batteries, including different materials and components (electrodes and separators) and battery geometries. As the separator plays an essential role in the performance and safety of lithium‐ion batteries, the recent theoretical simulation work for this battery component are shown, with particular emphasis on morphology, dendrite growth, ionic transport, and mechanical properties. Further theoretical simulations and modeling of this battery component are still required for improving performance, taking into consideration varying geometric parameters such as pore size, porosity, and tortuosity as well as the optimization of the lithium diffusion process and ionic conductivity value. Theoretical simulations of battery separators will play an essential role in the new generation of lithium‐ion batteries, allowing the improvement of their performance while reducing experimental probes and time.

This paper presents the concept of pluggable parallelisation that allows scientists to develop "sequential like" codes that can take advantage of multi-core, cluster and grid systems. In this approach parallel applications are developed by plugging parallelisation patterns/idioms into scientific codes (e.g., "sequential like" codes), softening the move from sequential to parallel programming and promoting the separation between domain specific code and parallelisation issues. Pluggable parallelisation combines three characteristics: 1) parallelisation is performed from "outside to inside", localising parallelisation concerns into well defined modules, reducing changes required to the domain specific code and avoiding invasive parallelisation of base code; 2) control view is separated from data view promoting a stronger separation of concerns which improves reuse of parallelisation concerns across platforms and enables fine-grained refinements; and 3) abstractions can be composed, supporting the development of more complex patterns based on fine-grained features. This paper presents the concept of pluggable parallelisation and shows how some well-known parallelisation strategies can be implemented in this approach. Results show that this is a feasible approach and performance is competitive with traditional parallel programming.

ReFlO is a framework and interactive tool to record and systematize domain knowledge used by experts to derive complex pipe-and-filter (PnF) applications. Domain knowledge is encoded as transformations that alter PnF graphs by refinement (adding more details), flattening (removing modular boundaries), and optimization (substituting inefficient PnF graphs with more efficient ones). All three kinds of transformations arise in reverse-engineering legacy PnF applications. We present the conceptual foundation and tool capabilities of ReFlO, illustrate how parallel PnF applications are designed and generated, and how domain-specific libraries of transformations are developed.

Solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) represent one of the most suitable options to overcome durability and safety issues. Herein, three‐component SPEs based on poly(vinylidene fluoride‐co‐hexafluoropropylene) as a binder, the 1‐butyl‐3‐methylimidazolium thiocyanate ionic liquid as an ionic conductive component, and zeolites, to improve SPE ionic conductivity and electrochemical stability, are prepared and characterized. Different zeolite and zeolite‐like structures (clinoptilolite, ETS‐4, and ETS‐10) are used, and the effect of lithium‐ion exchange in their structures is evaluated. A clear influence of the ion exchange process on the crystallinity of the prepared samples is observed, which plays a key role in the conduction mechanisms. The ionic conductivity of the samples at room temperature is of the order of 10−3 S cm−1, making them suitable for battery applications. The assembled batteries show promising results at room temperature, proving that the ion exchange has a positive effect on battery performance. The ion‐exchanged clinoptilolite sample presents the best performance at a prolonged cycle number, with an initial discharge capacity of about 130 mAh g−1 at C/10, and a capacity retention of 70% after 50 cycles. Thus, it is proved that the ion exchange process in microporous silicates represents a suitable strategy to develop high‐performance solid‐state lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs).

The blooming of different cloud data stores has turned polystore systems to a major topic in the nowadays cloud landscape. Especially, as the amount of processed data grows rapidly each year, much attention is being paid on taking advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of the underlying data stores. To provide data federation, a typical polystore solution defines a common data model and query language with translations to API calls or queries to each data store. However, this may lead to losing important querying capabilities. The polyglot approach of the CloudMdsQL query language allows data store native queries to be expressed as inline scripts and combined with regular SQL statements in ad-hoc integration queries. Moreover, efficient optimization techniques, such as bind join, can still take place to improve the performance of selective joins. In this paper, we introduce the distributed architecture of the LeanXcale query engine that processes polyglot queries in the CloudMdsQL query language, yet allowing native scripts to be handled in parallel at data store shards, so that efficient and scalable parallel joins take place at the query engine level. The experimental evaluation of the LeanXcale parallel query engine on various join queries illustrates well the performance benefits of exploiting the parallelism of the underlying data management technologies in combination with the high expressivity provided by their scripting/querying frameworks.