Dynamic simulation, control, and design of a novel solar thermal hybrid power plant

PosterSolar power is among the promising technologies leading towards cleaner fuel. However, there are still technological challenges regarding the reliability of power generation due to its intermittency. This work demonstrates the synergies that exist in integrated hybrid systems, where a dispatchable fuel is used in conjunction with concentrated solar power

Residual Effects of Calcium Silicate on the Movement and Availability of Nutrients in Tropical Soils

The residual effects of calcium silicate on plant uptake and movement of nutrients in a Gibbsihumox were studied in a series of three experiments. First, kikuyu grass and desmodium were grown in the field to determine the magnitude of response to residual Si applied several years earlier at various P and pH levels; second, the partial recovery of applied Si during five years of cropping was determined at 3 pH levels; and third, uptake of residual Si by rice grown on soil collected from the field experiment at the end of five years was studied in a growth chamber. A study of soil A1 extraction methods in relation to plant A1 uptake and yield was also conducted on some Hawaiian soils. The combined yields of seven harvests of kikuyu grass and desmodium increased significantly with increasing residual P levels, but was not significantly affected by residual Si or soil pH. The relative yield differential between the three Si treatments decreased sharply with time and at the end of 56 months yield from 1660 Si was only 2.5% higher than that without Si, whereas yield from 830 Si was less than the yield without Si. The decline with time in relative yield response to P applications, on the other hand, was small indicating a continued efficiency of P applied 56 months earlier in increasing yields on a Gibbsihumox. However, it should be pointed out that two supplemental additions of P were made 21 and 27 months after the initial treatments. Although residual Si produced highly significant increases in water-extractable soil Si, the levels at the end of the experiment were low which suggests that supplemental amounts of calcium silicate may be required to maintain yield response to Si. Modified Truog-extractable P was significantly higher at 1660 Si than at zero Si five years after Si applications. Phosphorus requirements of a Gibbsihumox were decreased significantly by residual Si and P in samples collected after 5 years of cropping. However, residual P was about 7 times more effective than residual Si in reducing P requirements. Multiple regression analysis indicated that in addition to the initially applied treatments, soil P and A1 and plant P, K, Mg, and possibly also Mn, Zn, Al, and Ca were important to plant growth in both species. Plant uptake by the sugarcane plant and ratoon crops, corn, and seven harvests of kikuyu grass accounted for 12 to 21 percent of the applied Si while exhaustive extraction of profile samples taken at the end of five years with 0.1N acetic acid, adjusted to pH 3*5 and containing 50 ppm P, recovered 1^ to 28 percent of the applied Si. There was no evidence that applied Si moved below 30 cm. Total recovery of applied Si ranged from 28 to k j percent which means that 57 to 72 percent of the applied Si remained in the soil in some form not readily displaced by phosphate solution. Rice plants extracted proportionately more native Si than did phosphate solution which resulted in comparable amounts of added Si being recovered by the two methods. Silicon uptake by rice accounted for 8 to 30 percent of applied Si and exhaustive phosphate extraction recovered 13 to 23 percent of applied Si. The amount of A1 extracted by various solutions decreased in the order of IN ammonium acetate + 0.2N barium chloride, pH *»-.8>lN ammonium acetate, pH ^ . 8 ^ 1 N barium chloride >. IN potassium chloride^ water ^.O.OIM calcium chloride. Aluminum extracted from five soils was in the order1 Akaka (Typic Hydrandept)> Halii (Typic Gibbsihumox)> Wahiawa (Tropeptic Eutrustox)> Lualualei (Typic Chromustert) = Kawaihae (Ustollic Camborthid) which was related to the degree of weathering and the amount of rainfall affecting the soil. Soil A1 extracted with unbuffered solutions, especially IN potassium chloride, was more closely related to plant A1 whereas A1 extracted with buffered solutions, especially IN ammonium acetate, pH ^.8 , was more closely related to plant yield than that extracted with other methods. However, R values for the soil Al-yield relationships were generally lower than those for soil Al-plant A1 relationships suggesting that while soil A1 has a strong influence on plant Al, it has considerably less effect on yield

Rural Institutions and Planned Change in Agriculture: A Comparative Perspective in Two Punjabs

Agricultural change in the Indian and Pakistan Punjabs has been brought about by their respective governments through formal organisations—cooperatives, credit banks, agriculture departments and/or special interest groups at the local level. The changes produced during 1960s and in subsequent period were dramatic but unsettling. Many have argued that the achievement of agricultural change in the region has depended to an important extent on the effectiveness of rural institutions in executing their role as agents of planned change.1 The present paper seeks to review the debate on the role of rural institutions in producing social and economic changes in the agrarian sectors of the Indian and Pakistan Punjabs and present some of the data which have stimulated this debate. The paper commences with an overview of the agrarian change in the two Punjabs. Then the programmes of planned change in the two regions are described, and the particular institution of change—cooperatives, credit banks, agricultural departments etc. are discussed in detail. At the specific level, the study aims at delineating the role played by rural institutions in initiating, stimulating, sustaining or retarding change in agriculture sectors of the two Punjabs. The role of rural institutions as a policy instrument for the promotion of agricultural expansion is examined. And finally the paper points out the implications of the past experience for the future role of rural institutions in the two Punjabs.

Structural Changes in Radio and Impacts on Music Listeners

The current study explores structural changes in radio and assesses their impact on music listeners in Pakistan utilizing the theoretical underpinnings of the political economy of communication. A mixed-method approach was used to answer research questions and evaluate hypotheses. A contextual analysis was utilized to evaluate the qualitative analysis after the interviews with 14 experts in the Pakistani radio industry were transcribed. Cross-tabulation with chi-square test, Independent Sample T-test, and AVOVA with Tukey tests were used to analyze survey responses from 200 respondents in order to determine the correlations between variables. The findings show that structural trends in the radio industry\u27s deregulation and commercialization have curtailed access to a varied range of listeners in Pakistan. According to the research, deregulation, licensing fees, new license fees, and the restriction of Indian music, revenue generation, and licensing to nonprofit FM radio have all limited access to a diverse spectrum of radio music listeners in Pakistan. This trend also leads broadcast media in Pakistan to produce and disseminate more entertainment programming rather than information and education programs

Augmenting a Hazard Analysis Method with Error Propagation Information for Safety-Critical Systems

Safety-critical systems need specific activities in the software development life cycle to ensure that the system will operate safely. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a new safety analysis method to identify hazards. The method uses error propagation information and the internal structure rather than the interfaces of a system. We propose development procedures to augment STPA (System-Theoretic Process Analysis) with error propagation information derived from the architecture description of a system represented in the AADL (Architecture Analysis Design Language). We will focus on how the AADL error ontology can be used to assist in identifying errors, how those errors propagate among components, and whether the errors lead to hazards in the system. Our research shows that tracing error propagation leads to the discovery of hazards and additional information that other methods miss. The new safety analysis method, Architecture Safety Analysis Method (ASAM), by augmenting STPA with early design information, is able to find more hazards, unsafe control actions, safety constraints and causes of the unsafe control actions than by using STPA alone. Our method leaves more false positives than STPA, but in safety analysis having false positive is preferred over missing actual hazards. We use the AADL error ontology to rigorously describe system component errors and how they propagate among components. We illustrate this rigorous description through several examples and we demonstrate that it yields hazards that an STPA analysis of the example did not find. In addition, we provide a mathematical notation and expressions so that formal analysis and verification of the hazards can be done to ensure that all causes of the hazards have been identified and that any developed safety constraints fully mitigate the hazards, through the use of compositional reasoning

Cognitive Experiments and Features for Computing Mental Stress

In this paper, mental stress is computed through cognitive experiments that induce stress. In a controlled laboratory environment, a group of students are involved in a series of mental challenges. While performing the cognitive tasks, stress is induced on the participants. Deep breathing exercise is performed in the start of experiments and then in between each activity to make the conditions normal and a participant feels relaxed. Various physiological features are recorded during experimental activities. Also, cerebral features are recorded that provide improved classification results. The severity of stress is different on each participant but the purpose of experimental protocol is to separate stressful conditions from relaxed environment. Support Vector machine (SVM) is used to identify relax or normal class from a number of stressed classes. It is shown that cerebral features improve the classification accuracy with a satisfactory margin and designed protocol system is able to compute the severity of induced stress

Compression Techniques for Different Applications of Real-Time Communication.

Real-time communication, is important and its usage is explained with through compression techniques. The application with compression techniques are applied discussed in this article. There is special focus on audio, video and image compression. Matlab is used as a simulation tool image compression is performed. The results are sometimes lossy and sometimes lossless, both types for compression is applied of image. The difference can be seen clearly in results

Current Studies and Applications of Krill Herd and Gravitational Search Algorithms in Healthcare

Nature-Inspired Computing or NIC for short is a relatively young field that tries to discover fresh methods of computing by researching how natural phenomena function to find solutions to complicated issues in many contexts. As a consequence of this, ground-breaking research has been conducted in a variety of domains, including synthetic immune functions, neural networks, the intelligence of swarm, as well as computing of evolutionary. In the domains of biology, physics, engineering, economics, and management, NIC techniques are used. In real-world classification, optimization, forecasting, and clustering, as well as engineering and science issues, meta-heuristics algorithms are successful, efficient, and resilient. There are two active NIC patterns: the gravitational search algorithm and the Krill herd algorithm. The study on using the Krill Herd Algorithm (KH) and the Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) in medicine and healthcare is given a worldwide and historical review in this publication. Comprehensive surveys have been conducted on some other nature-inspired algorithms, including KH and GSA. The various versions of the KH and GSA algorithms and their applications in healthcare are thoroughly reviewed in the present article. Nonetheless, no survey research on KH and GSA in the healthcare field has been undertaken. As a result, this work conducts a thorough review of KH and GSA to assist researchers in using them in diverse domains or hybridizing them with other popular algorithms. It also provides an in-depth examination of the KH and GSA in terms of application, modification, and hybridization. It is important to note that the goal of the study is to offer a viewpoint on GSA with KH, particularly for academics interested in investigating the capabilities and performance of the algorithm in the healthcare and medical domains.Comment: 35 page

Image encryption algorithm based on the density and 6D logistic map

One of the most difficult issues in the history of communication technology is the transmission of secure images. On the internet, photos are used and shared by millions of individuals for both private and business reasons. Utilizing encryption methods to change the original image into an unintelligible or scrambled version is one way to achieve safe image transfer over the network. Cryptographic approaches based on chaotic logistic theory provide several new and promising options for developing secure Image encryption methods. The main aim of this paper is to build a secure system for encrypting gray and color images. The proposed system consists of two stages, the first stage is the encryption process, in which the keys are generated depending on the chaotic logistic with the image density to encrypt the gray and color images, and the second stage is the decryption, which is the opposite of the encryption process to obtain the original image. The proposed method has been tested on two standard gray and color images publicly available. The test results indicate to the highest value of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), unified average changing intensity (UACI), number of pixel change rate (NPCR) are 7.7268, 50.2011 and 100, respectively. While the encryption and decryption speed up to 0.6319 and 0.5305 second respectively

GOOSE Algorithm: A Powerful Optimization Tool for Real-World Engineering Challenges and Beyond

This study proposes the GOOSE algorithm as a novel metaheuristic algorithm based on the goose's behavior during rest and foraging. The goose stands on one leg and keeps his balance to guard and protect other individuals in the flock. The GOOSE algorithm is benchmarked on 19 well-known benchmark test functions, and the results are verified by a comparative study with genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), dragonfly algorithm (DA), and fitness dependent optimizer (FDO). In addition, the proposed algorithm is tested on 10 modern benchmark functions, and the gained results are compared with three recent algorithms, such as the dragonfly algorithm, whale optimization algorithm (WOA), and salp swarm algorithm (SSA). Moreover, the GOOSE algorithm is tested on 5 classical benchmark functions, and the obtained results are evaluated with six algorithms, such as fitness dependent optimizer (FDO), FOX optimizer, butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA), whale optimization algorithm, dragonfly algorithm, and chimp optimization algorithm (ChOA). The achieved findings attest to the proposed algorithm's superior performance compared to the other algorithms that were utilized in the current study. The technique is then used to optimize Welded beam design and Economic Load Dispatch Problem, three renowned real-world engineering challenges, and the Pathological IgG Fraction in the Nervous System. The outcomes of the engineering case studies illustrate how well the suggested approach can optimize issues that arise in the real-world