2,031 research outputs found
Optimal Installation of Heat Pumps in Large District Heating Networks
Power-to-heat technology represents a promising solution for the decarbonization of the energy sector. The installation of large-scale heat pumps within district heating systems is widely recognized to be a cost-effective and competitive way to provide flexibility to the electric system, enhancing the use of intermittent renewable energy sources. The goal of this paper is to show how the economic and environmental benefits provided by the installation of a large-scale heat pump in existing district heating systems vary according to the installation location in different scenarios. To do that, an integrated methodology is developed. This includes a physical model of the thermo-fluid dynamic of the district heating network and a detailed modeling of the heat pump. To compare the different positions and also the different operating conditions, an approach based on exergy analysis is adopted. Moreover, a specific control strategy of the mass-flow rate is analyzed to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The application to a real large-scale district heating network shows that reductions in CO2 emissions of almost 4% can be obtained by installing a single heat pump of about 4 MWe (over a total thermal load of about 305 MWt), while this positive effect can be reduced by up to 63% if placing the heat pump at non-optimal locations
Thermodynamic properties of Holstein polarons and the effects of disorder
The ground state and finite temperature properties of polarons are studied
considering a two-site and a four-site Holstein model by exact diagonalization
of the Hamiltonian. The kinetic energy, Drude weight, correlation functions
involving charge and lattice deformations, and the specific heat have been
evaluated as a function of electron-phonon (e-ph) coupling strength and
temperature. The effects of site diagonal disorder on the above properties have
been investigated. The disorder is found to suppress the kinetic energy and the
Drude weight, reduces the spatial extension of the polaron, and makes the
large-to-small polaron crossover smoother. Increasing temperature also plays
similar role. For strong coupling the kinetic energy arises mainly from the
incoherent hopping processes owing to the motion of electrons within the
polaron and is almost independent of the disorder strength. From the coherent
and incoherent contributions to the kinetic energy, the temperature above which
the incoherent part dominates is determined as a function of e-ph coupling
strength.Comment: 17 pages. 17 figure
Scaling of a large-scale simulation of synchronous slow-wave and asynchronous awake-like activity of a cortical model with long-range interconnections
Cortical synapse organization supports a range of dynamic states on multiple
spatial and temporal scales, from synchronous slow wave activity (SWA),
characteristic of deep sleep or anesthesia, to fluctuating, asynchronous
activity during wakefulness (AW). Such dynamic diversity poses a challenge for
producing efficient large-scale simulations that embody realistic metaphors of
short- and long-range synaptic connectivity. In fact, during SWA and AW
different spatial extents of the cortical tissue are active in a given timespan
and at different firing rates, which implies a wide variety of loads of local
computation and communication. A balanced evaluation of simulation performance
and robustness should therefore include tests of a variety of cortical dynamic
states. Here, we demonstrate performance scaling of our proprietary Distributed
and Plastic Spiking Neural Networks (DPSNN) simulation engine in both SWA and
AW for bidimensional grids of neural populations, which reflects the modular
organization of the cortex. We explored networks up to 192x192 modules, each
composed of 1250 integrate-and-fire neurons with spike-frequency adaptation,
and exponentially decaying inter-modular synaptic connectivity with varying
spatial decay constant. For the largest networks the total number of synapses
was over 70 billion. The execution platform included up to 64 dual-socket
nodes, each socket mounting 8 Intel Xeon Haswell processor cores @ 2.40GHz
clock rates. Network initialization time, memory usage, and execution time
showed good scaling performances from 1 to 1024 processes, implemented using
the standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocol. We achieved simulation
speeds of between 2.3x10^9 and 4.1x10^9 synaptic events per second for both
cortical states in the explored range of inter-modular interconnections.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, 4 table
Obstacle Avoidance Cell Discovery using mm-waves Directive Antennas in 5G Networks
With the advent of next-generation mobile devices, wireless networks must be upgraded to fill the gap between huge user data demands and scarce channel capacity. Mm-waves tech- nologies appear as the key-enabler for the future 5G networks design, exhibiting large bandwidth availability and high data rate. As counterpart, the small wave-length incurs in a harsh signal propagation that limits the transmission range. To overcome this limitation, array of antennas with a relatively high number of small elements are used to exploit beamforming techniques that greatly increase antenna directionality both at base station and user terminal. These very narrow beams are used during data transfer and tracking techniques dynamically adapt the direction according to terminal mobility. During cell discovery when initial synchronization must be acquired, however, directionality can delay the process since the best direction to point the beam is unknown. All space must be scanned using the tradeoff between beam width and transmission range.
Some support to speed up the cell search process can come from the new architectures for 5G currently being investigated, where conventional wireless network and mm-waves technologies coexist. In these architecture a functional split between C-plane and U-plane allows to guarantee the continuous availability of a signaling channel through conventional wireless technologies with the opportunity to convey context information from users to network.
In this paper, we investigate the use of position information provided by user terminals in order to improve the performance of the cell search process. We analyze mm-wave propagation environment and show how it is possible to take into account of position inaccuracy and reflected rays in presence of obstacle
Optimal operation of district heating networks through demand response
In this paper, an optimization method aiming at minimizing the thermal peaks in district heating networks is proposed. The method relies on a thermo-fluid dynamic model of both the supply and return networks and permits to analyze the opportunities for thermal peak shaving through “virtual storage”. The latter is obtained through variation of the thermal request profiles of the users. The presence of a peak in the morning is due to the shut-down or attenuation of the heating systems during the night, which lead to a dramatical increase of the thermal request early in the morning. The peak compromises a full exploitation of cogeneration and renewable plants that are able to cover just a portion of the maximum load. Consequently, boilers have to be used, leading the system to a performance reduction and to an increase of primary energy consumption. Moreover, the peak makes the possibility of network extension quite difficult, because of the limitation on mass flow rates in the pipes. For this reason, a model is developed to make the thermal profile as flat as possible. The model is applied to a portion of the Turin district heating network, which is the largest network in Italy. Results show that reductions between 20% and 42% are possible, depending on the maximum changes in the possible schedules
Interplay between destructive quantum interference and symmetry-breaking phenomena in graphene quantum junctions
We study the role of electronic spin and valley symmetry in the quantum interference (QI) patterns of the transmission function in graphene quantum junctions. In particular, we link it to the position of the destructive QI antiresonances. When the spin or valley symmetry is preserved, electrons with opposite spin or valley display the same interference pattern. On the other hand, when a symmetry is lifted, the antiresonances are split, with a consequent dramatic differentiation of the transport properties in the respective channel. We demonstrate rigorously this link in terms of the analytical structure of the electronic Green function, which follows from the symmetries of the microscopic model, and we confirm the result with numerical calculations for graphene nanoflakes. We argue that this is a generic and robust feature that can be exploited in different ways for the realization of nanoelectronic QI devices, generalizing the recent proposal of a QI-assisted spin-filtering effect [A. Valli et al., Nano Lett. 18, 2158 (2018)10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b00453]
Anomalous impurity effects in nonadiabatic superconductors
We show that, in contrast with the usual electron-phonon Migdal-Eliashberg
theory, the critical temperature Tc of an isotropic s-wave nonadiabatic
superconductor is strongly reduced by the presence of diluted non-magnetic
impurities. Our results suggest that the recently observed Tc-suppression
driven by disorder in K3C60 [Phys. Rev. B vol.55, 3866 (1997)] and in
Nd(2-x)CexCuO(4-delta) [Phys. Rev. B vol.58, 8800 (1998)] could be explained in
terms of a nonadiabatic electron-phonon coupling. Moreover, we predict that the
isotope effect on Tc has an impurity dependence qualitatively different from
the one expected for anisotropic superconductors.Comment: 10 pages, euromacr.tex, europhys.sty, 6 figures. Replaced with
accepted version (Europhysics Letters
A multi-blob representation of semi-dilute polymer solutions
A coarse-grained multi-blob description of polymer solutions is presented,
based on soft, transferable effective interactions between bonded and
non-bonded blobs. The number of blobs is chosen such that the blob density does
not exceed their overlap threshold, allowing polymer concentrations to be
explored deep into the semi-dilute regime. This quantitative multi-blob
description is shown to preserve known scaling laws of polymer solutions and
provides accurate estimates of amplitudes, while leading to orders of magnitude
increase of simulation efficiency and allowing analytic calculations of
structural and thermodynamic properties.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Polaron formation for a non-local electron-phonon coupling: A variational wave-function study
We introduce a variational wave-function to study the polaron formation when
the electronic transfer integral depends on the relative displacement between
nearest-neighbor sites giving rise to a non-local electron-phonon coupling with
optical phonon modes. We analyze the ground state properties such as the
energy, the electron-lattice correlation function, the phonon number and the
spectral weight. Variational results are found in good agreement with analytic
weak-coupling perturbative calculations and exact numerical diagonalization of
small clusters. We determine the polaronic phase diagram and we find that the
tendency towards strong localization is hindered from the pathological sign
change of the effective next-nearest-neighbor hopping.Comment: 11 page
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