Disposable sensors in diagnostics, food and environmental monitoring

Disposable sensors are low‐cost and easy‐to‐use sensing devices intended for short‐term or rapid single‐point measurements. The growing demand for fast, accessible, and reliable information in a vastly connected world makes disposable sensors increasingly important. The areas of application for such devices are numerous, ranging from pharmaceutical, agricultural, environmental, forensic, and food sciences to wearables and clinical diagnostics, especially in resource‐limited settings. The capabilities of disposable sensors can extend beyond measuring traditional physical quantities (for example, temperature or pressure); they can provide critical chemical and biological information (chemo‐ and biosensors) that can be digitized and made available to users and centralized/decentralized facilities for data storage, remotely. These features could pave the way for new classes of low‐cost systems for health, food, and environmental monitoring that can democratize sensing across the globe. Here, a brief insight into the materials and basics of sensors (methods of transduction, molecular recognition, and amplification) is provided followed by a comprehensive and critical overview of the disposable sensors currently used for medical diagnostics, food, and environmental analysis. Finally, views on how the field of disposable sensing devices will continue its evolution are discussed, including the future trends, challenges, and opportunities

PR controller-based droop control strategy for AC microgrid using Ant Lion Optimization technique

Microgrids are now an integral part of the modern power system to maintain the stability of the power distribution process. Ensuring the frequency and voltage stability in the autonomous mode is quite a challenging task indeed. These have now reached the extent of utilizing evolutionary intelligence techniques leading to the concept of intelligent microgrids. In this work, a novel droop control strategy is implemented with a proportional resonant controller, whose proportional gain is optimized by the Ant Lion Optimization algorithm (A.L.O). The efficacy of the A.L.O algorithm for its application in the primary level droop control for voltage stability is investigated in this work. The superiority of the A.L.O optimized PR controller over the conventional PI controller is compared in terms of error indices, timed domain specifications, speed of response, voltage regulation and T.H.D levels. It could ensure a higher speed of response, better voltage stability and higher power quality as against its PI counterpart. The performance of the proposed A.L.O optimized PR controller is validated by comparing it with the performance achieved by controllers tuned with two other algorithms namely, particle swarm optimization (P.S.O) and Satin bower bird optimization (S.B.O). The proposed controller could ensure better steady-state stability compared to the other two

Decoupler-Based Feedback Control Strategy for Interlinking Converter in a Hybrid Microgrid

In a hybrid microgrid with AC and DC subgrids, the interlinking converter (IC) is the key element connecting the two subgrids. The performance of the interlinking converter is adversely affected by the d- and q-axis impedance interaction between the inner control loops. This interaction is highly undesirable since it adversely affects both the dynamic and the steady-state performance of the IC. Based on this, a novel feedback-based decoupling strategy is developed to overcome the cross-coupling effect in the mathematical model of the interlinking converter. This is a novel concept since the feed-forward compensation techniques are utilized to address the cross-coupling effect in prior related works, which has an inherent disadvantage of additional disturbance due to the addition of the compensating terms. In this study, a complete decoupling of the d and q axes was achieved, and the first-order transfer functions were obtained for the control loops using systematic block-reduction algebra and direct synthesis approaches. With this model, computational complexities are reduced and the inner control loops are free from impedance interaction effects, thereby achieving enhanced transient stability. Perfect decoupling of the voltage vectors is achieved by the matrix diagonalization method. Furthermore, the novelty of the proposed control is that the decoupled model is integrated with a normalization-based coordinate control strategy for effective bidirectional power transfer via the interlinking converter. Additionally, the proposed controller’s validity was tested for its performance under different transients in the MATLAB Simulink platform. The simulation results validated the proposed control strategy by showing that a faster response is ensured. A high-quality reference signal is generated due to the effective decoupling achieved. This observation was also validated by comparing the T.H.D. levels of a decoupled model’s reference power signal to one without a decoupling strategy

Validation of a portable device (iSperm ®) for the assessment of stallion sperm motility and concentration

The objective of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of a novel, portable device (iSperm (R) Equine for assessing concentration and motility of stallion semen). In the first experiment, semen concentration was determined by the iSperm (R) Equine (Aidmics Biotechnology), Androvision (R) (Minitube) and NucleoCounter (R) SP-100 (TM) (ChemoMetec). The total motility and progressive motility were determined by the iSperm (R) Equine and the Androvision (R) using the manufacturer's guidelines. Frozen/thawed semen samples (n = 33) at various dilutions were analysed for concentration and motility with the above-mentioned devices. There was a significant correlation between the concentrations measured with iSperm (R) and NucleoCounter (R) at all the measured dilutions. Moreover, <10% difference in concentrations was observed between the iSperm (R) and NucleoCounter (R) using the Bland-Altman test. There was also a significant correlation between iSperm (R) and Androvision (R) for total and progressive motility. In the second experiment, the parameters used in the Androvision (R) were modified to match those of the iSperm (R). Total motility and progressive motility of frozen/thawed semen samples (n = 10) were determined, and the similarity between the Androvision (R) and iSperm (R) was confirmed by correlation studies and Bland-Altman test. The results of these experiments demonstrate that the iSperm (R) offers a reliable and practical alternative for the semi-automated measurement of concentration and motility of stallion semen in the field. The iSperm (R) enables the practitioner to obtain objective and repeatable measurements on a variety of semen types (fresh, cooled and frozen) in the field at the time of insemination and thus acquire more insight into the quantity and quality of the provided insemination doses. This mare-side diagnostic tool may help practitioners in identifying presumed subfertility problems more rapidly and act accordingly

Offering Strategy of Thermal-Photovoltaic-Storage Based Generation Company in Day-Ahead Market

Designing appropriate strategies for the participation of generation companies (GenCos) in the electricity markets has always been a concern for researchers. Generally, a set of dispatchable and non-dispatchable units constitute GenCos. This chapter presents a coordinated offering structure for the participation of a GenCo consisting of thermal, photovoltaic (PV), and battery storage system (BSS) in the day-ahead (DA) electricity market. The proposed offering structure is formulated as a three-stage stochastic programming problem while a scenario-based technique is utilized to handle the uncertainty related to electricity prices and PV production. From another point of view, a compatible risk-measuring index with multi-stage stochastic programming problems, namely conditional value at risk (CVaR), is also considered in the proposed structure. The proposed offering model is not only able to derive the offering curves of GenCo but also is capable of applying various emission limitations pertaining to thermal units.©2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Nojavan, S., & Zare K. (eds). Electricity markets : new players and pricing uncertainties. Springer, Cham. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36979-8_6.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed