Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Solar cell parameter accuracy improvement, via refinement of the Co-Content function. Part 1: theoretical analysis

In this Part 1 of this series of articles, the accuracy on the obtention of the shunt resistance (R sh ), the series resistance (R s ), the ideality factor (n), the light current (I lig ), and the saturation current (I sat ), via the use of the Co-content function CCV,I=∫0VI−IscdV (where Isc=IV=0 ) is investigated theoretically, as function of the number of measured points per voltage ( PV ) and percentage noise ( pn ). Reasonable values are obtained for R sh , R s , and I lig , with PV = 11 measurement points per V if the pn is 0.1% or less. For a reasonable determination of n at least PV = 101 measurement points per V are needed. I sat determination requires pn of 0.01% or lower with at least PV = 101 measured points per V and should be evaluated at large values of V. The results given in this Part 1 are used in Part 2 to discuss the reported application of the CCV,I to obtain R sh , R s , n, I lig , and I sat found in the literature.
Modeling, optimization, and cost analysis of an IGCC plant with a membrane reactor for carbon capture

This article presents a theoretical study on the integration of a membrane reactor (MR) for carbon capture into an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant. First-principles, simplified systems-level models for the individual IGCC units and the MR are introduced for their subsequent plantwide integration. The integrated plant model is then used for simulation studies that assume different MR characteristics. Using this model, an optimization problem is formulated to analyze the MR effects when adding it to the IGCC plant, while satisfying all of the process constraints in streams and performance variables. The solution of this optimization problem indicates improvements in the original case studies, including capital cost savings as high as $18 million for the optimal case under nominal process conditions. To determine the cost implications of inserting the MR into the IGCC plant, a differential cost analysis is performed taking into account major plant capital and operating costs. This analysis considers the same amount of coal and power generation for cases with and without the MR. The results of this analysis based on a present value of annuity calculation show break even costs for the MR within the feasible range for membrane fabrication, even for short membrane lifetimes. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 62: 1568–1580, 2016
Triple band frequency selective surface design for global system for mobile communication systems

As a result of the enormous increase in mobile phone usage throughout the world, mobile phone base stations are located in almost everywhere nowadays. Many scientific studies have investigated possible health symptoms of mobile systems radiation. The globally recognised organisations have started to release maximum radio-frequency (RF) exposure levels that are regarded as safe. An efficient approach to decrease the RF exposure levels inside the buildings is to transform building walls to a frequency selective surface which filters out global system for mobile communication signals but allows the others, such as radio and television signals. This study proposes a new frequency selective surface element geometry which leads to a minimum 20 dB attenuation in 900, 1800 and 2100 MHz mobile communication bands according to Swiss electromagnetic radiation prevention limit values (NISV, 23 December 1990). High-frequency structure simulator software is used for simulation and design purposes. Due to a given good insight into the resonance characteristics of the FSS structures, it is benefited from the equivalent circuit model in the optimisation process. Achieved results show that the proposed FSS element geometry has a stable frequency response with minimum 20 dB of attenuation levels for transverse-electric (TE) and transverse-magnetic (TM) polarisations when the angle of incident wave is varied from 0° to 60°.
Large Area Aboveground Biomass and Carbon Stock Mapping in Woodlands in Mozambique with L-Band Radar: Improving Accuracy by Accounting for Soil Moisture Effects Using the Water Cloud Model

Soil moisture effects limit radar-based aboveground biomass carbon (AGBC) prediction accuracy as well as lead to stripes between adjacent paths in regional mosaics due to varying soil moisture conditions on different acquisition dates. In this study, we utilised the semi-empirical water cloud model (WCM) to account for backscattering from soil moisture in AGBC retrieval from L-band radar imagery in central Mozambique, where woodland ecosystems dominate. Cross-validation results suggest that (1) the standard WCM effectively accounts for soil moisture effects, especially for areas with AGBC ≤ 20 tC/ha, and (2) the standard WCM significantly improved the quality of regional AGBC mosaics by reducing the stripes between adjacent paths caused by the difference in soil moisture conditions between different acquisition dates. By applying the standard WCM, the difference in mean predicted AGBC for the tested path with the largest soil moisture difference was reduced by 18.6%. The WCM is a valuable tool for AGBC mapping by reducing prediction uncertainties and striping effects in regional mosaics, especially in low-biomass areas including African woodlands and other woodland and savanna regions. It is repeatable for recent L-band data including ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, and upcoming SAOCOM and NISAR data.
On the economics of storage for electricity: Current state and future market design prospects

Since the early beginnings of the electricity system, storage has been of high relevance for balancing supply and demand. Through expanded electricity production by variable renewable technologies such as wind and photovoltaics, the discussion about new options for storage technologies is emerging. In addition, the electricity markets were subject to remarkable alterations. Some developments which describe these changes are increasing electricity generation from variable renewables and the continuing decentralization. These developments have led, among other required transformations, to demands for additional capacities of storage technologies. However, their economics will play a crucial role in their effective market penetration in the following years. The core objective of this work is to conduct a review on the relevance of storage options for electricity and its costs, economics, welfare effects, and on issues of electricity market design. In addition, based on expected Technological Learning prospects for future economics are derived. The major result is that the perspectives of electricity storage systems from an economic viewpoint are highly dependent on the storage's operation time, the nature of the overall system, availability of other flexibility options, and sector coupling. All market‐based storage technologies have to prove their performance in the large electricity markets or if applied decentralized, the (battery) systems compete with the electricity prices at the final customers level when the battery costs are also taken into consideration. Yet, new storage capacities should only be added when it is clear that electricity generation from variable renewables will also be expanded in a way that excess generation is expected.
Method for false attack detection in face identification system

The article analyzes and evaluates the state of the problem of detecting a printed attack, false data entry into the biometric identification system. The existing methods of replacing the biometric properties of registered users are discussed, as well as methods of combating counterfeiting in biometric systems using motion analysis, analysis of local movements on the face and recognition of facial images based on the assessment of facial vitality. The directions of research to improve the effectiveness of methods for combating false input data have been determined.
Pulsed gate bias control of GaN HEMTs to improve pulse-to-pulse stability in radar applications

A significant improvement is demonstrated in the measured pulse-to-pulse stability of an S-band 6 W GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) power amplifier by generating an appropriate pulse of the gate bias and thus a warm-up drain current just before each radio-frequency (RF) pulse of a periodic and coherent radar burst. The amplitude and the width of this gate bias pulse preceding each periodic RF pulse of the burst are experimentally varied to investigate the trade-off between the improvement of pulse-to-pulse stability and the total power-added efficiency. Finally, this technique of synchronised warm-up gate bias pulse demonstrated a 10 dB improvement of measured amplitude pulse-to-pulse stabilities to meet the critical stability requirement below −55 dB for the RF power amplifier.
Analysis of a Multi-directional Data Access Control System for Underwater Wireless Network using UAN MAC Protocols

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) face new threats and prospects as a result of recent technological advances. Providing large-scale, and high spatial-temporal resolution of ocean exploration data is highly crucial in environmental monitoring, ocean energy production, and marine science research. Underwater wireless communications, however, face many challenges, including bandwidth constraints, multipath propagation, and fading, long end-to-end propagation latency, and limited power supply with batteries. Underwater monitoring tasks are seriously hampered by data losses due to low link qualities and collisions. Therefore, in UWSN, the design and implementation of an energy-aware, secure, and less propagation delay concern MAC protocol is important. This paper presents a simulation-based performance analysis for a multi-directional data access control system using UAN-CW, UAN-RC, and UANALOHA MAC protocols in an underwater wireless network. A two-way half-duplex acoustic modem has been implemented to analyze the consumed and remaining energy of the network. To assess MAC protocols evaluation, we compared three MAC protocols focusing on throughput, delay, packet delivery ratio, and energy consumption. Simulations were carried out by using the ns3 simulation tool. The simulation results show that UAN-CW MAC protocol outperforms two protocols in respect of throughput, delay, packet delivery ratio, and energy consumption. However, the remaining energy for UAN-RC-MAC is higher than others.
Ultra-Wideband-Based Localization for Quadcopter Navigation

Micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are promising to play more and more important roles in both civilian and military activities. Currently, the navigation of UAVs is critically dependent on the localization service provided by the Global Positioning System (GPS), which suffers from the multipath effect and blockage of line-of-sight, and fails to work in an indoor, forest or urban environment. In this paper, we establish a localization system for quadcopters based on ultra-wideband (UWB) range measurements. To achieve the localization, a UWB module is installed on the quadcopter to actively send ranging requests to some fixed UWB modules at known positions (anchors). Once a distance is obtained, it is calibrated first and then goes through outlier detection before being fed to a localization algorithm. The localization algorithm is initialized by trilateration and sustained by the extended Kalman filter (EKF). The position and velocity estimates produced by the algorithm will be further fed to the control loop to aid the navigation of the quadcopter. Various flight tests in different environments have been conducted to validate the performance of UWB ranging and localization algorithm.
A Security Review in the UAVNet Era: Threats, Countermeasures, and Gap Analysis

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming one of the main technological supports for commercial applications, embracing many domains ranging from human safety to the medical field, agriculture and environment, multimedia production, and even commercial delivery. This rise in popularity, however, is causing an increasing interest from criminals, making UAVs the target of new attacks. To fully characterize the current UAV cybersecurity landscape, we perform a complete literature review, digging into drone security historic facts and scientific studies on the matter, reviewing specialized articles and scientific papers focusing on cybersecurity threats and gaps in the context of small UAVs in commercial applications. Being a recent research and development area, most of the articles have been published between 2016 and 2020 as a direct consequence of the increase of security concerns and interest in the drone field. Papers in this review deal with UAV cyberthreats and related vulnerabilities, identifying flaws experimented in a lab or describing incidents detected in the field. Communication, sensors, and system misconfigurations are among the most important threat vectors, while sensor spoofing/jamming and malware DoS/control are among the most cited threats. Threat vectors permit depicting a complete overview of the topic and potential countermeasures known to date, with related gap analysis, also accounting for the recent Unmanned Aircraft System evolution toward ad hoc or cloud-based UAV networks. Countermeasures include the adoption of traditional communication encryption and standard protocols, GPS spoofing/jamming mitigation, encryption and privacy-aware implementations, and counter-malware techniques, to name the most adopted. It also emerges that often attacks are simply ported or adapted from other attacks in similar domains, while peculiar attacks still remain such as targeted physical attacks, specific UAV malware, and GPS spoofing/jamming.
Who’s Who? Discrimination of Human Breast Cancer Cell Lines by Raman and FTIR Microspectroscopy

Simple Summary Normal-to-malignant transition in human cells is still a poorly understood process, as well as the mechanisms leading to cancer invasion and metastasis. An in-depth characterisation and understanding of the genetic and chemical variations underlying carcinogenesis and cancer progression are paramount for improving diagnosis and design better therapeutic strategies, aiming at a better prognosis for oncology patients. The present study reports the application of spectroscopic methods (micro-Raman and infrared) for identifying specific biomarkers of malignancy in several types of human breast cancer cells. The results thus obtained led to an accurate discrimination between the highly metastatic mammary tumours (triple-negative) and the less aggressive ones (non-triple negative), as well as among triple-negative subtypes. Abstract (1) Breast cancer is presently the leading cause of death in women worldwide. This study aims at identifying molecular biomarkers of cancer in human breast cancer cells, in order to differentiate highly aggressive triple-negative from non-triple-negative cancers, as well as distinct triple-negative subtypes, which is currently an unmet clinical need paramount for an improved patient care. (2) Raman and FTIR (Fourier transform infrared) microspectroscopy state-of-the-art techniques were applied, as highly sensitive, specific and non-invasive methods for probing heterogeneous biological samples such as human cells. (3) Particular biochemical features of malignancy were unveiled based on the cells’ vibrational signature, upon principal component analysis of the data. This enabled discrimination between TNBC (triple-negative breast cancer) and non-TNBC, TNBC MSL (mesenchymal stem cell-like) and TNBC BL1 (basal-like 1) and TNBC BL1 highly metastatic and low-metastatic cell lines. This specific differentiation between distinct TNBC subtypes—mesenchymal from basal-like, and basal-like 1 with high-metastatic potential from basal-like 1 with low-metastatic potential—is a pioneer result, of potential high impact in cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Rhizosphere Microbiome of Forest Trees Determines Their Resistance to Soil-borne Pathogens

Background and aimsThe ability of plants to cope with environmental pressure and the interaction between rhizosphere microorganisms and host trees play an important role in the stability and function of forest ecosystems. Beneficial microbes recruited to the plant rhizosphere and stably association with tree roots can potentially reduce biotic stress, but the biochemical processes involved in coping with pathogen attack are not fully understood. Here, we aimed to investigate the ecology process of rhizosphere microbiota from four broad-leaved and three coniferous tree varieties involving in the suppression of soil-borne fungal pathogens. MethodsWe used separation cultivation and in vitro antagonistic experiments to investigate the inhibitory effects of rhizosphere microbiome on pathogenic fungi. Rhizosphere microbiome was then sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq platform, and root exudates of trees were measured by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). ResultsRhizosphere microbes from seven tree varieties had strong inhibitory effects on fungal pathogens, nevertheless, there were significant differences in their capacity. The dissimilarities in rhizosphere bacterial communities that were significantly correlated with phylogenetic distance of trees had a greater influence on suppression of pathogens compared with microbial abundance and diversity. Combined analysis of a random forest model and co-occurrence networks, revealed a cooperative relationship between key groups that were positively associated with inhibition of fungal pathogens in the tree rhizosphere. This process was further strengthened by specific metabolites secreted by tree roots. ConclusionsIn general, the rhizosphere microbiota of seven tree species had different inhibitory effects on fungal pathogens, and the cooperative relationship within the rhizosphere microbial community plays an important role in maintaining trees resistance to soil pathogens stress.
Laboratory Testing of Demand-Response Enabled Household Appliances

With the advent of the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems capable of two-way communications between the utility's grid and the building, there has been significant effort in the Automated Home Energy Management (AHEM) industry to develop capabilities that allow residential building systems to respond to utility demand events by temporarily reducing their electricity usage. Major appliance manufacturers are following suit by developing Home Area Network (HAN)-tied appliance suites that can take signals from the home's 'smart meter,' a.k. a. AMI meter, and adjust their run cycles accordingly. There are numerous strategies that can be employed by household appliances to respond to demand-side management opportunities, and they could result in substantial reductions in electricity bills for the residents depending on the pricing structures used by the utilities to incent these types of responses.The first step to quantifying these end effects is to test these systems and their responses in simulated demand-response (DR) conditions while monitoring energy use and overall system performance.
Traditional Uses and Variation in Curcumin Contentin Varieties of Curcuma-the Saffron of India

Medicinal plants have hundreds of chemical compounds that are practised in modern and traditional medication to deal with a variety of disorders (Ahn, 2017). Aromatic medicinal plants are plants that produce fragrance and are utilized to treat a range of ailments (Shankar et al., 2015). Curcuma longa is a perennial flowering herb plant native to Southern Asia that belongs to the ginger Zingiberaceae family (Priyadarsini et al., 2003). It is derived from the rhizomes of Curcuma longa and is recognized as the “Golden Spice of India. ” It necessitates annual rainfall and a mean temperature of 20 to 30°C (68 to 86°F). It has rhizomes on the stems, elliptical leaves, flowers, and a pedicel with short dense spikes. It can grow to a height of one metre, or 3 feet and three inches. This herb has aromatic rhizomes that are yellowish to orange (Jadhav & Jagadale, 2018). Turmeric is a fragrant medicinal plant that consists of a variety of bioactive compounds. In folk medicine, these compounds were used to treat bile duct diseases, atrophy, cough, diabetic foot ulcer, hepatic dysfunction, rheumatoid arthritis, and sinus infection (Rathod et al., 2019). Because Indian Haldi is of the richest quality, it has become the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter. Erode, in Tamil Nadu, is regarded as the world’s largest producer of turmeric. As a result, it’s also known as Yellow City, Turmeric City and Textile City (Prasad & Aggarwal, 2011). Other leading states in India that grow turmeric include Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Assam, West Bengal, and Odisha (Choudhuri et al., 2018).
Biphasic Functions of Sodium Fluoride (NaF) in Soft and in Hard Periodontal Tissues

Sodium fluoride (NaF) is widely used in clinical dentistry. However, the administration of high or low concentrations of NaF has various functions in different tissues. Understanding the mechanisms of the different effects of NaF will help to optimize its use in clinical applications. Studies of NaF and epithelial cells, osteoblasts, osteoclasts, and periodontal cells have suggested the significant roles of fluoride treatment. In this review, we summarize recent studies on the biphasic functions of NaF that are related to both soft and hard periodontal tissues, multiple diseases, and clinical dentistry.
Challenges in productivity measurements & improvements in service organizations

Service productivity is dependent on intellectual activities and service provider abilities and motivations. Service productivity can impact overall performance very significantly and therefore must be measured and improved. Service productivity can also be improved through technology interventions. This research paper seeks to provide answers to practicing managers about means of measurement of productivity & ways to enhance it across a wide range of services. Some of the important factors influencing productivity are work habits, personal feelings and attitudes of service providers and the work climate. Skill development and productivity enhancing initiatives of the management also play a critical part. While technology can be a productivity improvement tool, if not used wisely it can have a detrimental effect on productivity. Human involvement and judgment cannot be replaced by technology. Also variations in Service Productivity can be caused by differences in service quality. Hence measurements must be made keeping in view parity of service quality and outcomes. The paper discusses a number of case studies by way of demonstration of how productivity can be enhanced. Finally the authors have suggested concrete steps that can be taken to enhance productivity in service organizations.