27,576 research outputs found
Production of carbon nanotubes by PECVD and their applications to supercapacitors
Mà ster en Nanociència i NanotecnologiaPlasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) is a versatile technique to obtain vertically dense-aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs) at lower temperatures than chemical vapor deposition (CVD). In this work, we used magnetron sputtering to deposit iron layer as a catalyst on silicon wafers. After that, radio frequency (rf) assisted PECVD reactor was used to grow CNTs. They were treated with water plasma and finally covered by MnO2 as dielectric layer in order to use CNTs as electrode for supercapacitors. Optimization of annealing time, reaction time and temperature, water plasma time and MnO2 deposition time were performed to find appropriate conditions to improve the characteristics of supercapacitors. SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy), TEM (Transmission Electron Microscopy), AFM (Atomic Force Microscopy) and Raman spectroscopy were used to characterize obtained electrodes
A scalable line-independent design algorithm for voltage and frequency control in AC islanded microgrids
We propose a decentralized control synthesis procedure for stabilizing
voltage and frequency in AC Islanded microGrids (ImGs) composed of Distributed
Generation Units (DGUs) and loads interconnected through power lines. The
presented approach enables Plug-and-Play (PnP) operations, meaning that DGUs
can be added or removed without compromising the overall ImG stability. The
main feature of our approach is that the proposed design algorithm is
line-independent. This implies that (i) the synthesis of each local controller
requires only the parameters of the corresponding DGU and not the model of
power lines connecting neighboring DGUs, and (ii) whenever a new DGU is plugged
in, DGUs physically coupled with it do not have to retune their regulators
because of the new power line connected to them. Moreover, we formally prove
that stabilizing local controllers can be always computed, independently of the
electrical parameters. Theoretical results are validated by simulating in PSCAD
the behavior of a 10-DGUs ImG
autoAx: An Automatic Design Space Exploration and Circuit Building Methodology utilizing Libraries of Approximate Components
Approximate computing is an emerging paradigm for developing highly
energy-efficient computing systems such as various accelerators. In the
literature, many libraries of elementary approximate circuits have already been
proposed to simplify the design process of approximate accelerators. Because
these libraries contain from tens to thousands of approximate implementations
for a single arithmetic operation it is intractable to find an optimal
combination of approximate circuits in the library even for an application
consisting of a few operations. An open problem is "how to effectively combine
circuits from these libraries to construct complex approximate accelerators".
This paper proposes a novel methodology for searching, selecting and combining
the most suitable approximate circuits from a set of available libraries to
generate an approximate accelerator for a given application. To enable fast
design space generation and exploration, the methodology utilizes machine
learning techniques to create computational models estimating the overall
quality of processing and hardware cost without performing full synthesis at
the accelerator level. Using the methodology, we construct hundreds of
approximate accelerators (for a Sobel edge detector) showing different but
relevant tradeoffs between the quality of processing and hardware cost and
identify a corresponding Pareto-frontier. Furthermore, when searching for
approximate implementations of a generic Gaussian filter consisting of 17
arithmetic operations, the proposed approach allows us to identify
approximately highly important implementations from possible
solutions in a few hours, while the exhaustive search would take four months on
a high-end processor.Comment: Accepted for publication at the Design Automation Conference 2019
(DAC'19), Las Vegas, Nevada, US
Flexibility Services to Minimize the Electricity Production from Fossil Fuels. A Case Study in a Mediterranean Small Island
The design of multi-carrier energy systems (MES) has become increasingly important in the last decades, due to the need to move towards more efficient, flexible and reliable power systems. In a MES, electricity, heating, cooling, water and other resources interact at various levels, in order to get optimized operation. The aim of this study is to identify the optimal combination of components, their optimal sizes and operating schedule allowing minimizing the annual cost for meeting the energy demand of Pantelleria, a Mediterranean island. Starting from the existing energy system (comprising diesel generators, desalination plant, freshwater storage, heat pumps and domestic hot water storages) the installation of solar resources (photovoltaic and solar thermal) and electrical storage were considered. In this way, the optimal scheduling of storage units injections, water desalination operation and domestic hot water production was deduced. An energy hub model was implemented using MATLAB to represent the problem. All equations in the model are linear functions, and variables are real or integer. Thus, a mixed integer linear programming algorithm was used for the solution of the optimization problem. Results prove that the method allows a strong reduction of operating costs of diesel generators also in the existing configuration
Static task mapping for tiled chip multiprocessors with multiple voltage islands
The complexity of large Chip Multiprocessors (CMP) makes design reuse a practical approach to reduce the manufacturing and design cost of high-performance systems. This paper proposes techniques for static task mapping onto general-purpose CMPs with multiple pre-defined voltage islands for power management. The CMPs are assumed to contain different classes of processing elements with multiple voltage/frequency execution modes to better cover a large range of applications. Task mapping is performed with awareness of both on-chip and off-chip memory traffic, and communication constraints such as the link and memory bandwidth. Besides proposing a linear programming model for small systems, a novel mapping approach based on Extremal Optimization is proposed for large-scale CMPs. This new combinatorial optimization method has delivered very good results in quality and computational cost when compared to the classical simulated annealing.Postprint (published version
Plug-and-play and coordinated control for bus-connected AC islanded microgrids
This paper presents a distributed control architecture for voltage and
frequency stabilization in AC islanded microgrids. In the primary control
layer, each generation unit is equipped with a local controller acting on the
corresponding voltage-source converter. Following the plug-and-play design
approach previously proposed by some of the authors, whenever the
addition/removal of a distributed generation unit is required, feasibility of
the operation is automatically checked by designing local controllers through
convex optimization. The update of the voltage-control layer, when units plug
-in/-out, is therefore automatized and stability of the microgrid is always
preserved. Moreover, local control design is based only on the knowledge of
parameters of power lines and it does not require to store a global microgrid
model. In this work, we focus on bus-connected microgrid topologies and enhance
the primary plug-and-play layer with local virtual impedance loops and
secondary coordinated controllers ensuring bus voltage tracking and reactive
power sharing. In particular, the secondary control architecture is
distributed, hence mirroring the modularity of the primary control layer. We
validate primary and secondary controllers by performing experiments with
balanced, unbalanced and nonlinear loads, on a setup composed of three
bus-connected distributed generation units. Most importantly, the stability of
the microgrid after the addition/removal of distributed generation units is
assessed. Overall, the experimental results show the feasibility of the
proposed modular control design framework, where generation units can be
added/removed on the fly, thus enabling the deployment of virtual power plants
that can be resized over time
Precoder design for space-time coded systems over correlated Rayleigh fading channels using convex optimization
A class of computationally efficient linear precoders for space-time block coded multiple-input multiple-output wireless systems is derived based on the minimization of the exact symbol error rate (SER) and its upper bound. Both correlations at the transmitter and receiver are assumed to be present, and only statistical channel state information in the form of the transmit and receive correlation matrices is assumed to be available at the transmitter. The convexity of the design based on SER minimization is established and exploited. The advantage of the developed technique is its low complexity. We also find various relationships of the proposed designs to the existing precoding techniques, and derive very simple closed-form precoders for special cases such as two or three receive antennas and constant receive correlation. The numerical simulations illustrate the excellent SER performance of the proposed precoders
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