Optimal integration of a hybrid solar-battery power source into smart home nanogrid with plug-in electric vehicle

Hybrid solar-battery power source is essential in the nexus of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV), renewables, and smart building. This paper devises an optimization framework for efficient energy management and components sizing of a single smart home with home battery, PEV, and potovoltatic (PV) arrays. We seek to maximize the home economy, while satisfying home power demand and PEV driving. Based on the structure and system models of the smart home nanogrid, a convex programming (CP) problem is formulated to rapidly and efficiently optimize both the control decision and parameters of the home battery energy storage system (BESS). Considering different time horizons of optimization, home BESS prices, types and control modes of PEVs, the parameters of home BESS and electric cost are systematically investigated. Based on the developed CP control law in home to vehicle (H2V) mode and vehicle to home (V2H) mode, the home with BESS does not buy electric energy from the grid during the electric price's peak periods

Poly(sulfur-random-(1,3-diisopropenylbenzene)) Based Mid-Wavelength Infrared Polarizer: Optical Property Experimental and Theoretical Analysis

Development of polymer based mid-wavelength infrared (MWIR) optics has been limited mainly due to high optical loss of organic polymers used in general optical components. In this study, a MWIR polarization grating based on a sulfuric polymer poly(sulfur-random-(1,3-diisopropenylbenzene)) with a low loss in the MWIR range was fabricated using a simple two-step process: imprint and metal deposition. Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy measurement showed that this polymeric MWIR polarizer selectively transmitted the polarized IR in transverse magnetic (TM) mode over the transverse electric (TE) mode at normal incidence. The measured extinction ratios (  = The ratio of transmissions in TM and TE) were 208, 176, and 212 at the wavelength of 3, 4, and 5 μm, respectively. The computational simulation and analytical model confirmed that the enhanced TM transmission efficiency and followed a Fabry-Pérot (FP) resonance mode within the created sulfuric polymer film. This polymeric MWIR polarizer demonstrated a great potential for broader applications in IR photonics to realize low-cost and durable optical components

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Soil water and salinity dynamics under the improved drip-irrigation scheduling for ecological restoration in the saline area of Yellow River basin

The drip-irrigation scheduled by different soil matric potential (SMP) thresholds at different stages according to soil water and salt management purposes was usually adopted for revegetation in saline-alkali land. To reveal the desalinization mechanism of this multi-stage drip-irrigation scheduling, a 3-year field trial, adopting this method for revegetation, was conducted in an arid saline area. The trial consisted of 5 irrigation treatments marked S1 S5, with their SMP that monitored directly under drip emitter at 0.2 m depth correspondingly controlled higher than -5, -10, -15, -20 and -25 kPa. Results showed the SMP threshold of 5 kPa during the unified irrigation stage induced a leaching fraction (LF) of 42.6% and a minimum recharge amount (MRA) from groundwater of zero, thus resulting the relative desalinization rate (RDR) of 91.8% in 0-120 cm soil layer. When treatment applied, the average electrical conductivity of the saturated soil extracts (ECe) in 0-40 cm among three growing seasons in S1-S5 treatments linearly increased from 0.90 to 1.73 dS/m as SMP threshold decreased from -5 to -25 kPa, resulting from the LF correspondingly decreasing from 18.4% to 2.5% and the MRA increasing from 0 to 21.4 mm. The inter-annual salt dynamic indicated a salt equilibrium state was formed in 80-120 cm soil layer when the SMP threshold was set higher than 10 kPa and that was formed in 40-80 cm soil layer if the SMP threshold was set between -20 and -15 kPa. This study found the SMP threshold controlled the LF and MRA, and eventually determined the dynamics of soil salinity, which explained the efficient desalinization mechanism under the multi-stage drip-irrigation scheduling. A key SMP threshold of 5 kPa for rapid soil leaching stage and that of -20 kPa for precise salt regulating stage were recommended for vegetation construction in the low-lying saline area

Controllable organic magnetoresistance in polyaniline coated poly(: P -phenylene-2,6-benzobisoxazole) short fibers

Herein, we first report a tunable organic magnetoresistance (OMAR) effect in polyaniline (PANI) coated acid treated poly(p-phenylene-2,6-benzobisoxazole) (t-PBO) short fibers. This unique OMAR is interpreted using the paramagnetic nature of PBO molecules combined with the localization length a0 calculated from the wave-function shrinkage model and forward interference model