Bioinspired Multifunctional Anti-icing Hydrogel

The recent anti-icing strategies in the state of the art mainly focused on three aspects: inhibiting ice nucleation, preventing ice propagation, and decreasing ice adhesion strength. However, it is has proved difficult to prevent ice nucleation and propagation while decreasing adhesion simultaneously, due to their highly distinct, even contradictory design principles. In nature, anti-freeze proteins (AFPs) offer a prime example of multifunctional integrated anti-icing materials that excel in all three key aspects of the anti-icing process simultaneously by tuning the structures and dynamics of interfacial water. Here, inspired by biological AFPs, we successfully created a multifunctional anti-icing material based on polydimethylsiloxane-grafted polyelectrolyte hydrogel that can tackle all three aspects of the anti-icing process simultaneously. The simplicity, mechanical durability, and versatility of these smooth hydrogel surfaces make it a promising option for a wide range of anti-icing applications

Hardware/software partitioning in Verilog.

We propose in this paper an algebraic approach to hardware/software partitioning in Verilog HDL. We explore a collection of algebraic laws for Verilog programs, from which we design a set of syntax-based algebraic rules to conduct hardware/software partitioning. The co-specification language and the target hardware and software description languages are specific subsets of Verilog, which brings forth our successful verification for the correctness of the partitioning process by algebra of Verilog. Facilitated by Verilog’s rich features, we have also successfully studied hw/sw partitioning for environment-driven systems

Aharonov-Bohm phase operations on a double-barrier nanoring charge qubit

We present a scheme for charge qubit implementation in a double-barrier nanoring. The logical states of the qubit are encoded in the spatial wavefunctions of the two lowest energy states of the system. The Aharonov-Bohm phase introduced by magnetic flux, instead of tunable tunnelings, along with electric fields can be used for implementing the quantum gate operations. During the operations, the external fields should be switched smoothly enough to avoid the errors caused by the transition to higher-lying states. The structure and field effects on the validity of the qubit are also studied.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

Dynamical behavior of interacting dark energy in loop quantum cosmology

The dynamical behaviors of interacting dark energy in loop quantum cosmology are discussed in this paper. Based on defining three dimensionless variables, we simplify the equations of the fixed points. The fixed points for interacting dark energy can be determined by the Friedmann equation coupled with the dynamical equations {in Einstein cosmology}. But in loop quantum cosmology, besides the Friedmann equation, the conversation equation also give a constrain on the fixed points. The difference of stability properties for the fixed points in loop quantum cosmology and the ones in Einstein cosmology also have been discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Optimal charging strategy of electric vehicles customers in a smart electrical car park

© 2016, Institution of Engineering and Technology. All rights reserved. A smart electrical car park with electric vehicles (EVs) parking there, regarded as a short-term storage system, could minimize the costs of EV customers and improve the main grid stability simultaneously. This system, including numerous bidirectional AC/DC converters, a local energy storage unit and a monitoring room, is firstly established. As the hourly prices of electricity fluctuating with time, EV owners would like to charge energy from the main grid during the low-price periods to save money, while discharging energy to the main grid during high-price periods. In order to achieve this, an optimal charging scheme is proposed to determine the charging rate of each EV based on the fluctuation of hourly prices and requirements of customers. Thus, this charging/discharging strategy can reduce the costs for EV owners and help keep the balance of supply and demand for the main grid. A comparison between the cost of EVs customers with and without the developed smart charging/discharging strategy in this smart electrical car park is presented and analysed in Matlab with an optimization problem solver named Cplex in this study. It is demonstrated that the proposed charging/discharging strategy can not only reduce EV owner's cost but also improve the main grid stability as well

Magneto-transport in impurity-doped few-layer graphene spin valve

Using Keldysh nonequilibrium Green's function method we study the spin-dependent transport through impurity-doped few layer graphene sandwiched between two magnetic leads with an arbitrary mutual orientations of the magnetizations. We find for parallel electrodes magnetizations that the differential conductance possesses two resonant peaks as the applied bias increases. These peaks are traced back to a buildup of a magnetic moment on the impurity due to the electrodes spin polarization. For a large mutual angle of the electrodes magnetization directions, the two resonant peaks approach each others and merge into a single peak for antiparallel orientation of the electrodes magnetizations. We point out that the tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) may change sign for relatively small changes in the values of the polarization parameters. Furthermore, we inspect the behaviour of the differential conductance and TMR upon varying the temperature.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev.