Renewable Energy from Living Plants to Power IoT Sensor for Remote Sensing

Renewable energy which can be used to replace traditional energy sources from fossil fuel is in dire demand to protect the earth from the further negative effect of climate change resulting from mining or drilling of fossil fuel and its related pollution. There are various renewable energy sources available, however, there is none currently that does not compete for arable land in nature or land for food production to enable the installation of the renewable energy facility. Thus, in this research, it is proposed a novel type of electrical energy which can be harvested from living plants and coexist well with nature without competing for any arable lands and at the same time generate energy for human needs. Plants generate energy from photosynthesis, respiration, and intercellular activities, and this energy, although is minute, still can be harvested as a new potential energy source to power any ultra-low power sensor for remote sensing purposes. Thus, it is presented in this paper, a characterization of the specific setup condition to harvest optimum minimum 3V from living plants and a power management circuit that can further boost the energy to an optimum level to power a wireless IoT sensor for remote sensing purposes. It turns the living plant into a plant-based cell. As there is wide vegetation in forests, jungles, plantations, and agricultural lands on earth, the combination of this energy from the plants could be a promising source of new renewable energy to mankind as this vegetation can exist for both food and energy production while it does not compete for arable land for the installation of energy sources such as what happens in fossil fuel, solar or wind energy to create greener earth

Extracting the mean size across the visual field in patients with mild, chronic unilateral neglect

Previous studies suggest that normal vision pools information from groups of objects in a display to extract statistical summaries (e.g., mean size). Here we explored whether patients with mild, chronic left neglect were able to extract statistical summaries on the right and left sides of space in a typical manner. We tested four patients using a visual search task and varied the mean size of a group of circles within the display. On each trial, a single circle first appeared in the center of the screen (the target). This circle varied in size from trial to trial. Then a multi-item display appeared with circles of various sizes grouped together either on the left or right side of the display. The instructions were to search the circles and determine whether the target was present or not. The circles were always accompanied by a group of task-irrelevant triangles that appeared on the opposite side of the display. On half the trials, the mean size of the circles was the size of the target. On the other half the mean size was different from the target. The patients were not told that this was the case, and no explicit report of the statistics was required. The results showed that when the targets were absent patients produced more false alarms to the mean than non-mean size when the circles were on the left (neglected) side of the display. This finding demonstrates that statistical information was implicitly extracted from the left group of circles. However, summary statistics on the right side were not limited to the circles. Rather it appears that participants pooled the distractors with the target circles, yielding a skewed statistical summary on the right side. These findings are discussed as they relate to statistical summary processing, visual search and segregation of right and left items in patients with mild, chronic unilateral neglect

Positioning Control of an Antagonistic Pneumatic Muscle Actuated System using Feedforward Compensation with Cascaded Control Scheme

This paper presents a feedforward compensation with cascaded control scheme (FFC) for the positioning control of a vertical antagonistic based pneumatic muscle actuated (PMA) system. Owing to the inherent nonlinearities and time varying parameters exhibited by PMA, conventional fixed controllers unable to demonstrate high positioning performance. Hence, the feedforward compensation with cascaded control scheme is proposed whereby the scheme includes a PID controller coupled with nonlinear control elements. The proposed scheme has a simple control structure in addition to its straightforward design procedures. Though there are nonlinear control elements involved, these elements are derived from the open loop system responses that does not requires any accurate known parameters. Performance of the FFC scheme are then evaluated experimentally and compared to a PID controller with feedforward compensation (FF-PID) in point-to-point motion of different step heights. Overall, the experimental results show that the effectiveness of the proposed FFC scheme in reducing the steady state error to zero in comparison to FF-PID controller for all cases of step heights examined

Thermosonication and optimization of stingless bee honey processing

The effects of thermosonication on the quality of a stingless bee honey, the Kelulut, were studied using processing temperature from 45 to 90 ℃ and processing time from 30 to 120 minutes. Physicochemical properties including water activity, moisture content, color intensity, viscosity, hydroxymethylfurfural content, total phenolic content, and radical scavenging activity were determined. Thermosonication reduced the water activity and moisture content by 7.9% and 16.6%, respectively, compared to 3.5% and 6.9% for conventional heating. For thermosonicated honey, color intensity increased by 68.2%, viscosity increased by 275.0%, total phenolic content increased by 58.1%, and radical scavenging activity increased by 63.0% when compared to its raw form. The increase of hydroxymethylfurfural to 62.46 mg/kg was still within the limits of international standards. Optimized thermosonication conditions using response surface methodology were predicted at 90 ℃ for 111 minutes. Thermosonication was revealed as an effective alternative technique for honey processing

Open challenges in tensile testing of additively manufactured polymers: A literature survey and a case study in fused filament fabrication

Additive manufacturing (AM, also commonly termed 3D printing) is progressing from being a rapid prototyping tool to serving as pillar of the Industry 4.0 revolution. Thanks to their low density and ease of printing, polymers are receiving increasing interest for the fabrication of structural and lightweight parts. Nonetheless, the lack of appropriate standards, specifically conceived to consistently verify the tensile properties of polymer parts and benchmark them against conventional products, is a major obstacle to the wider uptake of polymer AM in industry. After reviewing the standardisation needs in AM with a focus on mechanical testing, the paper closely examines the hurdles that are encountered when existing standards are applied to measure the tensile properties of polymer parts fabricated by fused filament fabrication (FFF, aka fused deposition modeling, FDM), which is presently the most popular material extrusion AM technique. Existing standards are unable to account for the numerous printing parameters that govern the mechanical response of FFF parts. Moreover, the literature suggests that the raster- and layer-induced anisotropic behaviour and the complicated interplay between structural features at different length scales (micro/meso/macro-structure) undermine pre-existing concepts regarding the specimen geometry and classical theories regarding the size effect, and ultimately jeopardise the transferability of conventional tensile test standards to FFF parts. Finally, the statistical analysis of the tensile properties of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) FFF specimens printed according to different standards (ASTM D638 type I and ASTM D3039) and in different sizes provides experimental evidence to confirm the literature-based argumentation. Ultimately, the literature survey, supported by the experimental results, demonstrates that, until dedicated standards become available, existing standards for tensile testing should be applied to FFF with prudence. Whilst not specified in conventional standards, set-up and printing parameters should be fully reported to ensure the repeatability of the results, rectangular geometries should be preferred to dumbbell-like ones in order to avoid premature failure at the fillets, and the size of the specimens should not be changed arbitrarily

PT-Symmetric Electronics

We show both theoretically and experimentally that a pair of inductively coupled active LRC circuits (dimer), one with amplification and another with an equivalent amount of attenuation, display all the features which characterize a wide class of non-Hermitian systems which commute with the joint parity-time PT operator: typical normal modes, temporal evolution, and scattering processes. Utilizing a Liouvilian formulation, we can define an underlying PT-symmetric Hamiltonian, which provides important insight for understanding the behavior of the system. When the PT-dimer is coupled to transmission lines, the resulting scattering signal reveals novel features which reflect the PT-symmetry of the scattering target. Specifically we show that the device can show two different behaviors simultaneously, an amplifier or an absorber, depending on the direction and phase relation of the interrogating waves. Having an exact theory, and due to its relative experimental simplicity, PT-symmetric electronics offers new insights into the properties of PT-symmetric systems which are at the forefront of the research in mathematical physics and related fields.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Vitamin and mineral supplementation for maintaining cognitive function in cognitively healthy people in late life

This is the protocol for a review and there is no abstract. The objectives are as follows: To evaluate the effects of vitamin and mineral supplementation on cognitive function in cognitively healthy people in late life

A scalar field instability of rotating and charged black holes in (4+1)-dimensional Anti-de Sitter space-time

We study the stability of static as well as of rotating and charged black holes in (4+1)-dimensional Anti-de Sitter space-time which possess spherical horizon topology. We observe a non-linear instability related to the condensation of a charged, tachyonic scalar field and construct "hairy" black hole solutions of the full system of coupled Einstein, Maxwell and scalar field equations. We observe that the limiting solution for small horizon radius is either a hairy soliton solution or a singular solution that is not a regular extremal solution. Within the context of the gauge/gravity duality the condensation of the scalar field describes a holographic conductor/superconductor phase transition on the surface of a sphere.Comment: 16 pages including 8 figures, v2: discussion on soliton solutions extended; v3: matches version accepted for publication in JHE

Vitamin and mineral supplementation for maintaining cognitive function in cognitively healthy people in mid life

This is the protocol for a review and there is no abstract. The objectives are as follows: To evaluate the effects of vitamin and mineral supplementation on cognitive function in cognitively healthy people in mid life

Vitamin and mineral supplementation for prevention of dementia or delaying cognitive decline in people with mild cognitive impairment

This is the protocol for a review and there is no abstract. The objectives are as follows: To evaluate the effects of vitamin and mineral supplementation for prevention of dementia or delaying cognitive decline in people with mild cognitive impairment