Towards cost-effective soil microbial fuel cell designs

Soil microbial fuel cell (SMFC) is a carbon-neutral energy harvesting technology that exploits the use of electroactive bacteria naturally present in soil to directly generate electricity from organic compounds. Given the simplicity of the system design, SMFCs have great potential to be used for decentralised solutions, especially in areas where access to conventional energy sources is limited. Yet, the high cost to power ratio severely limits the translation of this technology into the market. With the aim of reducing the capital cost, in this study we explore the effect of decreasing the amounts of current collector (CC) on the performance. The results demonstrate that increasing the amount of current collector per surface area of the electrode is not a feasible way of enhancing power densities, as to increase the performance by 20% and 35%, the amount of current collector would have to be increased by 150% and 300%, respectively. This highlights the importance of economic evaluations when optimising the design of a SMFC.

Inertial-range Magnetic-fluctuation Anisotropy Observed from Parker Solar Probe’s First Seven Orbits

Solar wind turbulence is anisotropic with respect to the mean magnetic field. Anisotropy leads to ambiguity when interpreting in situ turbulence observations in the solar wind because an apparent change in the measurements could be due to either the change of intrinsic turbulence properties or to a simple change of the spacecraft sampling direction. We demonstrate the ambiguity using the spectral index and magnetic compressibility in the inertial range observed by the Parker Solar Probe during its first seven orbits ranging from 0.1 to 0.6 au. To unravel the effects of the sampling direction, we assess whether the wave-vector anisotropy is consistent with a two-dimensional (2D) plus slab turbulence transport model and determine the fraction of power in the 2D versus slab component. Our results confirm that the 2D plus slab model is consistent with the data and the power ratio between 2D and slab components depends on radial distance, with the relative power in 2D fluctuations becoming smaller closer to the Sun.

Optimization of Different Deployments and Resolution of Antenna Arrays in SWIPT

In this paper, three different deployment antenna arrays with circular, triangular and rectangular shapes were used to optimize the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system for the Internet of Things (IoT). Ray-tracing was employed to channel the model for a real environment. Self-adaptive dynamic differential evolution (SADDE) was used to optimize the harvesting power ratio with bit error rate constrained by the two different resolutions of feed length (high resolution and low resolution). Numerical results show that those three antenna arrays can achieve the goal for information quality in both resolutions. The harvesting power ratio for the circular array is the best and the harvesting power ratio for the rectangular array is the worst. The harvesting power ratio for the low-resolution case is 25% lower than the high-resolution case. However, the circular antenna array is the best deployment in those three different arrays for both high and low resolutions.

A Wide-Band High-Gain Doherty Power Amplifier With Class-AB HEMT Amplifiers

In this paper, an attempt has been made to design a Doherty power amplifier (DPA) with high-gain and wide-band. For this purpose, two peak amplifiers are used to improve the performance of the main amplifier. Main and auxiliary amplifiers with the same structure to the class-AB type and by using micro-strip lines in place of input/output and load matching networks, transmission lines and inductors of drain and gate, that minimize the losses in the DPA. The current DPA is implemented with GaN_HEMT_CLF1G0530_100v transistor and Rogers4003 substrate, which for 1GHz frequency in 0.5-1.5GHz bandwidth will be able to be at P-1dB point (this point, input power as 30dBm and output power as 47.98dBm) increase Drain efficiency and Power added efficiency (PAE) to 81.95% and 80.73%, respectively. The DPA helps to expand the back-off region and extend the linearity region, so the Peak to average power ratio (PAPR) will be 5.21dB and the Adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) as 58.7dBc. A gain of 17.06-17.92dB was also obtained, which is significant compared to the results of similar samples.

Steric Effects on Electroosmotic Nano-Thrusters under High Zeta Potentials

Here, space electroosmotic thrusters in a rigid nanochannel with high wall zeta potentials are investigated numerically, for the first time, considering the effect of finite size of the ionic species. The effect, which is called a steric effect, is often neglected in research about micro/nano thrusters. However, it has vital influences on the electric potential and flow velocity in electric double layers, so that the thruster performances generated by the fluid motion are further affected. These performances, including thrust, specific impulse, thruster efficiency, and the thrust-to-power ratio, are described by using numerical algorithms, after obtaining the electric potential and velocity distributions under high wall zeta potentials ranging from −25.7 mV to −128.5 mV. As expected, the zeta potential can promote the development of thruster performances so as to satisfy the requirement of space missions. Moreover, for real situation with consideration of the steric effect, the thruster thrust and efficiency significantly decrease to 5–30 micro Newtons and 80–90%, respectively, but the thrust-to-power ratio is opposite, and expends a short specific impulse of about 50–110 s.

A Modified SLM Scheme for PAPR Reduction of UFMC Systems

One of the most promising 5G waveform candidates is the universal-filtered multicarrier system (UFMC). The UFMC system reduces the out-of-band (OoB) emission, bringing about higher spectral efficiency. This is assumed to reach robustness against frequency offset and low latency. Although, as aforementioned, the UFMC system offers many advantages, it lacks high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) as a multicarrier transmission technique. This research paper tackles two approaches; firstly, RCS, by developing a simulated conventional SLM system, with modifications to generate the same number of waveforms, while using fewer UFMC modulators. Secondly, by developing a simulated conventional SLM system, with modifications using the same number of modulators to generate more waveforms that would be generated in the conventional scheme. The two sets of results from the proposed M-SLM scheme are compared to each other, and to other PAPR reduction schemes using OFDM and UFMC. To reduce PAPR in UFMC systems, (M-SLM) scheme with low complexity is proposed. The essence of the proposed M-SLM scheme is represented in making use of the cyclically shifting process and FMC modulator’s linearity property. The proposed M-SLM scheme uses Um UFMC modulators to produce Uw alternative UFMC waveforms, where Uw = Um (2Um − 1). As a result, drawing a comparison with existing SLM based PAPR reduction schemes for UFMC systems; the proposed M-SLM scheme's computational complexity is reduced. Finally, there is a comparison between the proposed M-SLM scheme and the schemes there in the literature according to PAPR reduction ability.

Influence Metal Berylliumof the Optical FiberCoreon plasmonic Properties

The paper include, the properties of the plasmonic optical fiber in which the core is beryllium metal were studied, were we studied the effect of this metal on the plasmonic fiber, and a mathematical program was used which is COMSOL MULTIPHYSICS, which depends on the finite element method (FEM) to deduce the first three modes and the effective refractive index, neff accompanying each wavelength. It was observed that when order the mode is increased, the lobes will increase, where the mode, LP 01 is one spot and the mode, LP11 are two spots and the mode, LP21 are four spots. An increase in the power indicator is increase red and yellow, and this applies to all modes. That is, by controlling the radius of the fiber core and the wavelength, it is possible to equilibrium the power ratio that propagates forward and backward. The neff , attenuation coefficient and propagation constant for different wavelengths and core radii for the first three modes were also studied. In all cases, we got the higher values when the wavelengths are small the value, and then these values begin to reduction at increasing wavelength.