Webinars

The Open Software Service for Classroom and Research (OSSCAR), an open web-based platform for educational content will be presented. OSSCAR provides a collaborative environment where teachers can easily develop, deploy, and access interactive notebooks that facilitate scientific learning via visualization, examples, and numerical experimentation. The platform aims at hosting a growing number of modules, each tackling a specific topic and with the potential to be combined and organised based on the needs of each class.

New web applications with educational content are welcome and can be easily created in the OSSCAR environment, that relies on friendly and common tools, such as python and Jupyter, as the key development tools. Easy deployment of the notebooks is achieved by automatic conversion into web application via the voila software and hosting on cloud solutions. Students can then access the material directly via the web avoiding the need of bespoke installations for individual courses and learn by performing specific tasks, solving exercises, and - importantly - experimenting in real time with the interactive content of the notebooks.

"In order to achieve full and equal access to and participation in science for women and girls, the United Nations General Assembly declared February 11 as the International day of Women and Girls in Science in 2015” (from the UN website).

CECAM honors this important occasion with a special afternoon dedicated to women who contributed to our field and beyond.

We start with a conversation between Shobhana Narasimhan (JNCASR, Jakkur, Bangalore) and Virginie de Mestral (ETH Zurich), who will share with us experiences and perspectives based on their remarkable professional journeys. Ample time will be provided for interactions with the audience – that we really hope will be diverse and engaged – to enable a broad discussion, hopefully bringing different points of views to the conversation.

112CO2 is an EU H2020 Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) project (H2020-EIC-FETPROACT-2019 GA no. 952219), renamed into Pathfinder within Horizon Europe and now part of the portfolio of the recently established European Innovation Council (EIC) funding schemes. FET (and Pathfinder) are projects starting from TRL 1-2 and finishing at TRL 3-4; they are meant to explore the applicative potential of fundamental research ideas. Concerning 112CO2, the objective is to promote the methane splitting process into COx-free hydrogen and graphitic carbon with high added-value. 112CO2 project aims at developing a low temperature methane splitting Ni-based catalyst, easy to regenerate and very active, and stable for at least 10 000 h. Why methane splitting technology to obtain cost-competitive hydrogen? This is to ease the clean energy transition at the core of EU objectives: methane is an abundant fossil fuel that is easier to transport and to distribute than hydrogen (using the existent natural gas infrastructure networks); if biomethane is used, negative CO2 footprint hydrogen is produced. Moreover, methane can be produced by several renewable sources (e.g., solar energy), and valorizing byproducts of other industries (e.g., bioCO2 contained in biogas). The vision is that one can transport biomethane locally, to some suitably large geographical area for which it is economically relevant to split it into hydrogen for the decentralized applications.

The methane splitting reaction at low-temperatures, bringing to different byproducts (e.g., carbon nanotubes, graphenic sheets, amorphous carbon, etc), and the problem of catalyst deactivation/regeneration are difficult, if not impossible, to investigate experimentaly, or without a suitable combination of simulations and experiments. Thus, simulations are key in this context and, more in general, in the study of industrially-relevant chemical processes. We identified several challenges: i) techniques for rare events to study chemical reactions, ii) computing accurate interatomic interaction at an affordable computational cost, iii) the modeling of processes in electronic excited states, for, e.g., photo-assisted reactions. This is what we want to discuss in this webinar. The webinar is addressed to non-specialists in the field of simulations, thus it is key to identify the main issues and explain, with a language accessible to experimentalist and engineers, challenges that have been already addressed and those that are still open.

The relevance and impact of High Performance Computing (HPC) on simulation and modeling can be quite different depending on the specific area, but we are all confronted with the relationship between new methods and algorithms and their implementation in proficient codes. We invite you to join us in an exploration of the relevance of HPC as an enabler of leading-edge simulation and modeling.

Join us for on-line sessions bringing together simulators young in years or at heart. Mixed-Gen is a venue for PhD students and young researchers to share their work, get expert feedback and have an opportunity to strengthen their scientific relations via a series of seminars on a broad range of topics.