Simplified Algorithm for Dynamic Demand Response in Smart Homes Under Smart Grid Environment

Under Smart Grid environment, the consumers may respond to incentive--based smart energy tariffs for a particular consumption pattern. Demand Response (DR) is a portfolio of signaling schemes from the utility to the consumers for load shifting/shedding with a given deadline. The signaling schemes include Time--of--Use (ToU) pricing, Maximum Demand Limit (MDL) signals etc. This paper proposes a DR algorithm which schedules the operation of home appliances/loads through a minimization problem. The category of loads and their operational timings in a day have been considered as the operational parameters of the system. These operational parameters determine the dynamic priority of a load, which is an intermediate step of this algorithm. The ToU pricing, MDL signals, and the dynamic priority of loads are the constraints in this formulated minimization problem, which yields an optimal schedule of operation for each participating load within the consumer provided duration. The objective is to flatten the daily load curve of a smart home by distributing the operation of its appliances in possible low--price intervals without violating the MDL constraint. This proposed algorithm is simulated in MATLAB environment against various test cases. The obtained results are plotted to depict significant monetary savings and flattened load curves.Comment: This paper was accepted and presented in 2019 IEEE PES GTD Grand International Conference and Exposition Asia (GTD Asia). Furthermore, the conference proceedings has been published in IEEE Xplor

Towards adaptive operational requirements for optimal application of evaporation-suppressing monolayer to reservoirs via a 'universal design framework'

Much of the chemical monolayer-based evaporation mitigation research was generated in the 1950s, 60s and 70s centred on the use of spreading long-chain fatty alcohols, such as hexadecanol (C16) and octadecanol (C18), on the water surface. Many researchers from this era have reported highly variable performance results (anywhere from 0-30% efficiency) attributing the highly variable evaporation reduction achieved to film volatilisation, drift, beaching on the lee shore and waves which can break-up or submerge the film.Failure to address this requirement has undoubtedly contributed to the lack of development in the use of monolayers despite some demonstration of useful evaporation suppression performance. In addition recent studies have also indicated that all water bodies have a naturally-occurring surface film, referred to as a microlayer, which can interact with artificial (chemical) monolayers. Natural microlayers are produced by hydrophobic plant waxes, phenolic compounds and other humified material, which concentrates populations of micro-organisms capable of utilizing these materials as organic substrates. This explains why common artificial monolayers (with carbon chain lengths of up to 16) are highly susceptible to biodegradation. Studies on Australian brown water storages reveal highly concentrated microbial microlayer communities, due to the coincidence of leaf and bark fall with low rainfall (Pittaway and van den Ancker 2009). This variation in the concentration of humified organic compounds in the storages is associated with both the volume of the storage, and the riparian vegetation within the water catchment. This paper sets out a strategic approach to the use of monolayer on a reservoir for evaporation mitigation. The approach recognises that every reservoir will have a specific set of user and environmental considerations which leads to a unique set of operational requirements. In order to capture and utilise this information a Universal Design Framework (UDF) has been developed. The UDF serves two purposes, firstly to inform the selection of monolayer material and system design for any given site (‘Planning Mode’), and secondly to inform (and potentially autonomously manage) day-to-day operations, i.e. the timing and amounts of monolayer application (‘Operational Mode’). The UDF takes into account the following parameters: • Critical water requirement periods: These will vary from location to location and at different times of the year. Hence, this is a user determined input. • Economics: The dollars-per-megalitre value of water will also vary from location to location and at different time of the year with respect to critical water requirement periods (e.g. irrigated cropping close to harvest). Included in this input is a user defined annual maximum cost outlay for the monolayer-based system. • Water storage factors: Inputs differ slightly depending on storage type (i.e. ring tank versus gully dam), but generally require information of length, width, shape, bank height, freeboard, full supply volume and geographical co-ordinate points for storage orientation. This would be determined by a basic on-site analysis • Climate and weather factors: Monthly average evaporation demand, rainfall and ambient air temperature information is required, including particularly wind speed frequency and prevailing wind direction, (e.g. from a local Automatic Weather Station (AWS) or via the Bureau of Meteorology SILO database, http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/silo/). In the Planning Mode mean and extreme historical climate data are used; and in the Operational Mode prevailing conditions are required. • Water quality and biological factors: Assessments are made of water source/s (e.g. runoff versus bore), water colour, turbidity, water chemistry (pH, electrical conductivity and UV absorbency), plus density of local catchment vegetation and catchment area. Once the above parameters are known, the UDF is used to determine (in Planning Mode) the most suitable monolayer material/s and optimal arrangement of application equipment, including number of applicators, their arrangement and application strategies for the particular reservoir and monolayer product. In Operational Mode the UDF will guide (or if required, fully control) operational procedures, i.e. the implementation of a unique application strategy for a specific product according to the hour-by-hour prevailing conditions. This paper also outlines decision-making processes within the UDF. Firstly, to determine suitable monolayer materials the UDF compares water quality and biological characteristics of the particular site to those of six benchmark reservoirs in SE Queensland which have been studied in detail (Pittaway and van den Ancker 2009). The biologically-closest informs the choice of appropriate monolayer material/s. Once the selection of a monolayer is made there are a number of unique characteristics that material possesses that will substantially influence the application strategies. Secondly, a simulation platform has been developed to determine the application strategies and operational requirements for the reservoir. The simulation enables rapid evaluation of a range of different sample water bodies to populate a decision chart similar to that for monolayer material selection. A central component of the simulation platform is a fluid-mechanical model of the dispersal of monolayer across a water surface area under the influence of environmental variables, principally wind speed and wind direction, which (in Planning Mode) determines: • optimal spacing between application points, • amount of monolayer applied from each applicator as well as the total amount applied, • placement of applicators to achieve optimal surface coverage, • number of applicator types required, and • percentage of surface coverage under a range of wind speeds and directions. The above simulated output information is unique to the particular reservoir and is essentially a specification for the design and operation of a monolayer application system for that specific site, and is used firstly (Planning Mode) to select appropriate application equipment capable of satisfying the monolayer application requirements; and secondly, if installed as planned, as the basis for day-to-day monolayer application (Operational Mode). Simulation results to date indicate that from large reservoirs, optimal surface coverage is best achieved by a number of fixed application points surrounding and within the reservoir spaced no further than 12 metres apart; and that a greater concentration of applicators is required upwind from the prevailing wind direction in addition to higher rates of monolayer application

Traditional Goddess worship culture of Tamil society and its impact on cinematic screen portray of this generation

The life of Ancient Tamil people was beautiful and full of emotions. They were the ones who gained great knowledge and experience from every phase of their lives. The knowledge and experience conserved, concocted and passed on in fragments by older generations. The people had begun to transform their love into worship and celebration. They preserved it in various art forms such as rhetoric, storytelling, painting, sculpture, street play, drama and literature for the future generations to know and cherish it. Different forms of media play a special role in transferring the same to people. Among these, cinema holds a pivotal space. The film captures the social structure born out of the aforementioned people's faith and conveys it through its story, shedding its light in the minds of the people. It is natural for people’s overwhelming beliefs to be reflected as stories of God and Goddesses. This article describes the worship of goddesses in literature and its relation to celebrating female actors on-screen in and by a Tamil society

Nedunelvaadai, - An Agam book from the perspective of Thinai Theories

The Sangam literature stands out as the classical literature of Tamil with its own uniqueness. Sangam literature can also be called Thinai literature. Tolkappiyar interprets the meaning of Thinai as a discipline. This discipline can be divided into Agam and Puram. Of these, the Agam discipline deals with the life of love, and the Puram discipline deals with the context of life, such as country-based warfare and heroism. The basic natural environment required by man is the source of the formulation of the theory of Thinai. This principle serves as a tool for distinguishing between the Agam and the Puram of the disciplines sung in a verse. On the basis of this, this Thinai theory has been introduced into the Patthuppaattu books of Sangam literature and examined in Nedunelvaadai, which consists of Agam-Puram concepts. It has been found out which Thinai prevails by quoting both the Thinai messages. It was examined here that Nedunelvadai is an Agam-Puram book containing the messages of the two Thinais since Nakkiran has mentioned the original messages of the Agatthinai and the symbolic flower "Vembu" for the Purathinai

An Adaptive Firefly Optimization (AFO) with Multi-Kernel SVM (MKSVM) Classification for Big Data Dimensionality Reduction

The data's dimensionality had already risen sharply in the last several decades. The "Dimensionality Curse" (DC) is a problem for conventional learning techniques when dealing with "Big Data (BD)" with a higher level of dimensionality. A learning model's performance degrades when there is a numerous range of features present. "Dimensionality Reduction (DR)" approaches are used to solve the DC issue, and the field of "Machine Learning (ML)" research is significant in this regard. It is a prominent procedure to use "Feature Selection (FS)" to reduce dimensions. Improved learning effectiveness such as greater classification precision, cheaper processing costs, and improved model comprehensibility are all typical outcomes of this approach that selects an optimal portion of the original features based on some relevant assessment criteria. An "Adaptive Firefly Optimization (AFO)" technique based on the "Map Reduce (MR)" platform is developed in this research. During the initial phase (mapping stage) the whole large "DataSet (DS)" is first subdivided into blocks of contexts. The AFO technique is then used to choose features from its large DS. In the final phase (reduction stage), every one of the fragmentary findings is combined into a single feature vector. Then the "Multi Kernel Support Vector Machine (MKSVM)" classifier is used as classification in this research to classify the data for appropriate class from the optimal features obtained from AFO for DR purposes. We found that the suggested algorithm AFO combined with MKSVM (AFO-MKSVM) scales very well to high-dimensional DSs which outperforms the existing approach "Linear Discriminant Analysis-Support Vector Machine (LDA-SVM)" in terms of performance. The evaluation metrics such as Information-Ratio for Dimension-Reduction, Accuracy, and Recall, indicate that the AFO-MKSVM method established a better outcome than the LDA-SVM method

Hydrostatic pressure effect on Tc of new BiS2 based Bi4O4S3 and NdO0.5F0.5BiS2 layered superconductors

We investigate the external hydrostatic pressure effect on the superconducting transition temperature (Tc) of new layered superconductors Bi4O4S3 and NdO0.5F0.5BiS2. Though the Tc is found to have moderate decrease from 4.8 K to 4.3 K (dTconset/dP = -0.28 K/GPa) for Bi4O4S3 superconductor, the same increases from 4.6 K to 5 K (dTconset/dP = 0.44 K/GPa) upto 1.31 GPa followed by a sudden decrease from 5 K to 4.7 K upto 1.75 GPa for NdO0.5F0.5BiS2 superconductor. The variation of Tc in these systems may be correlated to increase or decrease of the charge carriers in the density of states under externally applied pressure.Comment: 3 pages text +Fig

Clinical Assessment and Metabolic Profile of Newly Diagnosed Hypertensives and Their Significance

INTRODUCTION: Hypertension has long been called as the silent killer as because when its symptoms are apparent the damage is already done to the system and to add to the worse they are mostly irreversible. The phenomenon of hypertension was first characterized at the turn of the previous century, when Riva-Rocci developed the prototype of the modern sphygmomanometer and so allowed the routine measurement of BP. Korotkov then perfected the sphygmomanometric technique by describing the sounds heard over the brachial artery as the pressure in the cuff is reduced. In general, the upper limits of normal BP in older persons had been considered to be a systolic value of 140 mm Hg and a diastolic value of 90 mm Hg. These figures have been adjusted downward to the point that readings in excess of 120/80 mm Hg may be considered abnormal. Population studies suggest that BP is a continuous variable, with no absolute dividing line between normal and abnormal values. A recent report on the global burden of hypertension indicates that nearly 1 billion adults (more than a quarter of the world’s population) had hypertension in 2000, and this is predicted to increase to 1.56 billion by 2025. Subjects with hypertension are known to have a two-fold higher risk of developing coronary artery disease (CAD), four times higher risk of congestive heart failure and seven times higher risk of cerebrovascular disease and stroke compared to normotensive subjects Hypertension has been identified as one of the leading risk factors for mortality, and is ranked third as a cause of disability adjusted life- ears.(4) Existing data suggests that the prevalence of hypertension has remained stable or has decreased in economically developed countries during the past decade, while it has increased in developing countries. However, the increase in the prevalence rates of hypertension needs to be quantified so as to plan for effective prevention strategies which are urgently needed in developing countries. However, in spite of its proven association with all clinical associations of atherosclerosis including peripheral vascular diseases hypertension is one disease which is more commonly mismanaged. The awareness about the disease and its complications are poor as only less than 30% of even known hypertensives have a good optimal control even in western population. Less studies are there in newly diagnosed hypertensives and the prevalence of complications and risk factors among them. Being the diabetes capital of the world already India is also projected to become the Hypertensive capital of the world by 2025. In this context this study is aimed in the evaluation of newly detected hypertensives in a tertiary care centre at Chennai and the prevalence of associated risk factors for future cardio vascular incident among them. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: 1. To study the complete profile of newly diagnosed hypertensives. 2. To stage them. 3. To study the prevalence of end organ damage among them. 4. To study the prevalence of metabolic syndrome, erectile dysfunction and coronary heart disease equivalents among them. 5. To calculate Framingham risk score for all of them. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Setting: This study is conducted in the Hypertension clinic of Madras Medical College and Government General Hospital in collaboration with the Institute of Biochemistry. Study Duration: This study was conducted over a period of 6 months from May2009 to October2009. Study Population: Patients attending the hypertensive clinic who are yet to be started on any Drugs. Type of Study: It’s a cross sectional study of patients attending hypertension clinic. Inclusion Criteria: 1. Age greater than 18 years. 2. patients newly diagnosed as hypertensives in out patient department Exclusion Criteria: 1. Age less than 18yrs. 2. known hypertensives who have discontinued drugs and have now come for treatment or with complications. 3. Known DM patient under antiproteinuria therapy. 4. Known CKD/ hypothyroid. 5. Known case of secondary HT or during evaluation found to have secondary causes. 6. Patients who are already under anti hypertensive drugs for other indications like CAHD, etc. Sample Size: 100 patients who came for the registration were taken for the study. METHODS: All patients underwent CBC, GTT, serum electrolytes, urea, creatinine, LFT, fasting lipid profile, serum calcium, uric acid, ECG, echo, USG abdomen, urine for microalbuminuria after giving written consent. A detailed examination to rule out secondary causes were done. BP was measured and staged. The classification is based on the average of two or more properly measured, seated Breading on each of two or more office visits. A standard proforma was used to record all variables for every individual patient. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: Data analysis was done with use of SPSS software version10. Descriptive statistics were used to calculate frequency. To examine the linear trend of proportions, trend chi-square was used and to find the test of association chi-square was computed. CONCLUSION: 1. 59% of newly diagnosed hypertensives had some form of end organ damages. 2. 52% of newly diagnosed hypertensives had metabolic syndrome and 75% among them had a CHD risk score of more than 10%. 3. 41.3% of males had erectile dysfunction among them. So when a antihypertensive is choosen for a male patient this should be taken into consideration. 4. 67% of patients had a BMI >25 that is they had obesity. 5. 56% of newly detected hypertensives have a CHD risk score of more than10% . So aggressive risk reduction is necessary. 6. Females tend to present late with more complications compared to males. 7. As diabetes, hypertension is also a multisystem disease and each hypertensive patient has to be individualised and managed. 8. Finally it’s high time that a routine screening programme is initiated at Community level to identify HT at early stages itself so that complications are averted