70,975 research outputs found
Mechanisms of light energy harvesting in dendrimers and hyperbranched polymers
Since their earliest synthesis, much interest has arisen in the use of dendritic and structurally allied forms of polymer for light energy harvesting, especially as organic adjuncts for solar energy devices. With the facility to accommodate a proliferation of antenna chromophores, such materials can capture and channel light energy with a high degree of efficiency, each polymer unit potentially delivering the energy of one photon-or more, when optical nonlinearity is involved. To ensure the highest efficiency of operation, it is essential to understand the processes responsible for photon capture and channelling of the resulting electronic excitation. Highlighting the latest theoretical advances, this paper reviews the principal mechanisms, which prove to involve a complex interplay of structural, spectroscopic and electrodynamic properties. Designing materials with the capacity to capture and control light energy facilitates applications that now extend from solar energy to medical photonics. © 2011 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland
RF-Powered Cognitive Radio Networks: Technical Challenges and Limitations
The increasing demand for spectral and energy efficient communication
networks has spurred a great interest in energy harvesting (EH) cognitive radio
networks (CRNs). Such a revolutionary technology represents a paradigm shift in
the development of wireless networks, as it can simultaneously enable the
efficient use of the available spectrum and the exploitation of radio frequency
(RF) energy in order to reduce the reliance on traditional energy sources. This
is mainly triggered by the recent advancements in microelectronics that puts
forward RF energy harvesting as a plausible technique in the near future. On
the other hand, it is suggested that the operation of a network relying on
harvested energy needs to be redesigned to allow the network to reliably
function in the long term. To this end, the aim of this survey paper is to
provide a comprehensive overview of the recent development and the challenges
regarding the operation of CRNs powered by RF energy. In addition, the
potential open issues that might be considered for the future research are also
discussed in this paper.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, Accepted in IEEE Communications Magazin
Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited
devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within
an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness
in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost,
WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology
formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object
detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make
optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design
goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process
(MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms
and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and
compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs
Micro-Engineered Devices for Motion Energy Harvesting
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