A Testbed for Investigating the Effect of Salinity and Turbidity in the Red Sea on White-LED-Based Underwater Wireless Communication

Several industrial and scientific underwater applications require high-speed wireless connectivity. Acoustic communications have low data rates and high latency, whereas attenuation in seawater severely limits radio frequency communications. Optical wireless communication is a promising solution, with high transmission rates (up to Gb/s) and little attenuation in water at visible wavelengths. This study explores the feasibility of white-LED-based underwater optical wireless communication (UWOC) by considering Red Sea parameters. High salinity is the most prominent attribute of the Red Sea that can affect underwater communication and requires investigation. Considering this, the received signal intensity fluctuation under increasing water salinity was experimentally investigated. In the same experiment, the impact of growing turbidity was tested, as it is the most influential parameter and tends to block the entire LED-based communication system with little increase. The experimental results show that the signals are affected less by salinity and more by turbidity but are found to be sufficiently strong to be used for communication in the Red Sea. Finally, it was concluded that a white LED is capable of sending data at the maximum possible salinity values of 40 g/L. However, the turbidity can significantly limit the transmission distance to less than 60 cm

Radio-frequency clock delivery via free-space frequency comb transmission

We characterize the instability of an rf clock signal caused by free-space transmission of a frequency comb (FC) under typical laboratory conditions. The phase-noise spectra show the involvement of multiple random processes. For a 10 m transmission, the rms timing jitter integrated over 1-105 Hz is 95 fs, and the root Allan variance over 1 s is 4 × 10-13. The measured Allan variance has a τ-1 behavior and an excellent agreement with the phase noise measurement. These results indicate the feasibility of FC-based free-space rf clock distribution over short distances. © 2009 Optical Society of America

Effects of Atmospheric Turbulence on Optical Wireless Communication in NEOM Smart City

International audienceThe foundation of any smart city requires an innovative and robust communication infrastructure. Many research communities envision free-space optical communication (FSO) as a promising backbone technology for the services and applications provided by such cities. However, the channel through which the FSO signal travels is the atmosphere. Therefore, the FSO performance is limited by the local weather conditions. The variation in meteorological variables leads to variations of the refractive index along the transmission path. These index inhomogeneities (i.e., atmospheric turbulence) can significantly degrade the performance of FSO systems. Thus, a practical implementation of the FSO link must carefully consider the atmospheric turbulence effect. This paper aims to investigate the feasibility of FSO communication for NEOM, a promising smart city in Saudi Arabia. We study the effect of weather conditions on FSO links using the micrometeorology model, taking into account actual weather data. The FSO performance in winter and summer was compared in terms of the bit error rate, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), link availability, and transmission distance. The study shows that the atmospheric turbulence strength is moderate and strong in winter and summer, respectively. The temperature has the biggest impact on the FSO system when compared to the other meteorological elements included in this study. Furthermore, at transmission distances less than 300 m, atmospheric turbulence does not significantly affect the FSO for the operating wavelength of 1550 nm. Furthermore, it has been shown that at transmission distances greater than 300 m, the SNR in summer is more than 18% higher than in winter. The findings of this research enable understanding of the effect of turbulence caused by NEOM weather on the FSO link, thus assisting engineers in establishing a reliable FSO backbone link by adjusting the relevant parameters

Fabrication and Characterization of Flexible Solid Polymers Electrolytes for Supercapacitor Application

In this work, solid flexible polymer blend electrolytes (PBE) composed of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) with different amounts of sodium thiocyanate (NaSCN) salt mixed in double-distilled water (solvent) are prepared via solution casting method. The obtained films are characterized using several techniques. The study of the surface morphology of the polymer blend salt complex films via the POM technique reveals the presence of amorphous regions due to the NaSCN effect. FTIR spectra studies confirm the complex formation between PVA, PVP, and NaSCN. The addition of 20 wt% NaSCN salt in the composition PVA: PVP (50:50 wt%) polymer blend matrix leads to an increase in the number of charge carriers and thus improves the ionic conductivity. The ionic conductivity of each polymer blend electrolyte was studied using the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) method. The highest room temperature ionic conductivity of 8.1 × 10−5 S/cm S cm−1 is obtained for the composition of PVA: PVP (50:50 wt%) with 20 wt% NaSCN. LSV test shows the optimized ion-conducting polymer blend electrolyte is electrochemically stable up to 1.5 V. TNM analysis reveals that 99% of ions contribute for the conductivity against 1% of electrons only in the highly conductive polymer electrolyte PVA: PVP (50:50 wt%) + 20 wt% NaSCN. A supercapacitor device was fabricated using the optimized ion-conducting polymer blend film and graphene oxide (GO) coated electrodes. The GCD curve clearly reveals the behavior of an ideal capacitor with less Faradic process and low ESR value. The columbic efficiency of the GO-based system is found to be 100%, the GO-based electrode exhibits a specific capacitance of 12.15 F/g and the system delivers the charge for a long duration. The specific capacitance of the solid-state supercapacitor cell was found to be 13.28 F/g via the CV approach close to 14.25 F/g obtained with EIS data at low frequency