Realization of Artificial Ice Systems for Magnetic Vortices in a Superconducting MoGe Thin-film with Patterned Nanostructures

We report an anomalous matching effect in MoGe thin films containing pairs of circular holes arranged in such a way that four of those pairs meet at each vertex point of a square lattice. A remarkably pronounced fractional matching was observed in the magnetic field dependences of both the resistance and the critical current. At the half matching field the critical current can be even higher than that at zero field. This has never been observed before for vortices in superconductors with pinning arrays. Numerical simulations within the nonlinear Ginzburg-Landau theory reveal a square vortex ice configuration in the ground state at the half matching field and demonstrate similar characteristic features in the field dependence of the critical current, confirming the experimental realization of an artificial ice system for vortices for the first time.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Thermal effect of wind generation on conventional generator in a microgrid

In order to reduce CO2 emissions, which is one of the key strategy in combatting global warming, development of wind energy technology as source of renewable energy has become more important globally. However, the variability of the wind speeds leads to the intermittent nature of wind power generation. The conventional generators in the system must be able to compensate this fluctuation to maintain system stability and meet the load demand in the grid. This in turn may increase the temperature of the conventional generators beyond what normally occurs without wind generation in the grid. The aim of the paper is to inestigate the effect of thermal heating of the generators due to the variable output of wind generation in different time of the year in a microgrid by proposing proper modelling in the simulation. The simulations are done in 24 hours period in four different time of the years corresponding to different seasons of the year