Ch.1 International Environmental Law: Changing Context, Emerging Trends, and Expanding Frontiers

This chapter provides an overview of international environmental law, which is the legal and regulatory framework devised by the community of sovereign states to address global environmental problems. These problems include the potential for runaway climate change, vanishing biodiversity, increasing freshwater scarcity, and severe degradation of marine resources and ocean ecosystems. In the last decade, international environmental law has acquired further breadth, depth, nuance, complexity, and reach. In particular, it is more deeply interconnected with policy and legal efforts in many other fields, including international trade and investment, human rights and migration, energy, disaster response, armed conflict, technology innovation and intellectual property protection. The chapter then explores and illustrates the ways in which international environmental law has evolved over the last decade. It highlights how the field has adapted to a changing geo-political context, as well as to the possibilities and limits of global regulation in addressing the complex, polycentric, and intractable nature of environmental harms.

Resource Caching and Task Migration Strategy of Small Cellular Networks under Mobile Edge Computing

As computing-intensive mobile applications become increasingly diversified, mobile devices’ computing power is hard to keep up with demand. Mobile devices migrate tasks to the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) platform and improve the performance of task processing through reasonable allocation and caching of resources on the platform. Small cellular networks (SCN) have excellent short-distance communication capabilities, and the combination of MEC and SCN is a promising research direction. This paper focuses on minimizing energy consumption for task migration in small cellular networks and proposes a task migration energy optimization strategy with resource caching by combining optimal stopping theory with migration decision-making. Firstly, the process of device finding the MEC platform with the required task processing resources is formulated as the optimal stopping problem. Secondly, we prove an optimal stopping rule’s existence, obtain the optimal processing energy consumption threshold, and compare it with the device energy consumption. Finally, the platform with the best energy consumption is selected to process the task. In the simulation experiment, the optimization strategy has lower average migration energy consumption and higher average data execution energy efficiency and average distance execution energy efficiency, which improves task migration performance by 10% ∼ 60%.

Metal-Ions Intercalation Mechanism in Layered Anode From First-Principles Calculation

Layered structure (MoS2) has the potential use as an anode in metal-ions (M-ions) batteries. Here, first-principles calculations are used to systematically investigate the diffusion mechanisms and structural changes of MoS2 as anode in lithium (Li)-, sodium (Na)-, magnesium (Mg)- and Zinc (Zn)-ions batteries. Li and Na ions are shown to be stored in the MoS2 anode material due to the strong adsorption energies (~−2.25 eV), in contrast to a relatively weak adsorption of Mg and Zn ions for the pristine MoS2. To rationalize the results, we evaluate the charge transfer from the M-ions to the MoS2 anode, and find a significant hybridization between the adsorbed atoms and S atoms in the MoS2 anode. Furthermore, the migration energy barriers of M ions are explored using first-principles with the climbing image nudged elastic band (CINEB) method, and the migration energy barrier is in the order of Zn > Mg > Li > Na ions. Our results combined with the electrochemical performance experiments show that Li- and Na-ions batteries have good cycle and rate performance due to low ions migration energy barrier and high storage capability. However, the MoS2 anode shows poor electrochemical performance in Zn- and Mg-ions batteries, especially Zn-ion batteries. Further analysis reveals that the MoS2 structure undergoes the phase transformation from 2H to 1T during the intercalation of Li and Na ions, leading to strong interaction between M ions and the anode, and thus higher electrochemical performance, which, however, is difficult to occur in Mg- and Zn-ions batteries. This work focuses on the theoretical aspects of M-ions intercalation, and our findings may stimulate the experimental work for the intercalation of multi-ions to maximize the capacity of anode in M-ions batteries.

Analysis of Burnup effects and Its Integrity Assessment in the Interim of Irradiation with Molecular Dynamics

Burnups can cause major structural changes in the edge of the fuel rod and a general degradation of the thermal conductivity. In irradiated mixed oxide fuels of UO2, PuO2 with NpO2 as fission products (FP) various chemical states depending on the conditions of the fuel is developed. This work, we firstly applied the MD relation to obtain the thermal conductivity of UO2, PuO2, and (U, Pu) O2 in temperature range of 300–2000 K. Lattice parameter, Burnup and the thermal conductivity were then calculated for specified UO2 and PuO2. This calculation relates the degradation of thermal conductivity with a number of pores and increasing temperature. Finally, the migration energy barrier and the recovery energies of the obstruction type defects were calculated with molecular dynamics simulation.

Mo2B, an MBene member with high electrical and thermal conductivities, and satisfactory performances in lithium ion batteries

Mo2B, a predicted MBene, shows high thermal and electrical conductivities, and a relatively low migration energy barrier for Li ions.