Power-Efficient Beacon Recognition Method Based on Periodic Wake-Up for Industrial Wireless Devices

Energy harvester-integrated wireless devices are attractive for generating semi-permanent power from wasted energy in industrial environments. The energy-harvesting wireless devices may have difficulty in their communication with access points due to insufficient power supply for beacon recognition during network initialization. In this manuscript, we propose a novel method of beacon recognition based on wake-up control to reduce instantaneous power consumption in the initialization procedure. The proposed method applies a moving window for the periodic wake-up of the wireless devices. For unsynchronized wireless devices, beacons are always located in the same positions within each beacon interval even though the starting offsets are unknown. Using these characteristics, the moving window checks the existence of the beacon associated withspecified resources in a beacon interval, checks again for neighboring resources at the next beacon interval, and so on. This method can reduce instantaneous power and generates a surplus of charging time. Thus, the proposed method alleviates the problems of power insufficiency in the network initialization. The feasibility of the proposed method is evaluated using computer simulations of power shortage in various energy-harvesting conditions

Complex Permittivity Extraction using Substrate Integrated Waveguide Cavity Resonator Without Cross-Sectioning

In this paper, a dielectric properties extraction method for millimeter-wave applications is presented. Substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) cavity resonators with the same structure and varied thicknesses are employed to separate the dissipation factor (DF) of the substrate material for the cavity resonators. The dielectric constant and loss tangent of the dielectric substrate for the SIW is extracted at the resonance frequencies based on the unloaded Q-factors of transmission loss measurement. The DF from the unloaded Q-factors, which is highly dependent on the thickness of the substrate, is extracted using an iterative fitting process for the substrate thickness estimation without cross sectioning. To validate the extraction method, the SIW cavity resonators are fabricated using RO4003C substrate material and the dielectric properties are extracted in the X-band (8.2 to 12.4 GHz). The extracted thicknesses of the SIW resonators are validated by cross-sectioning. Additionally, the extracted dielectric properties are also verified by comparing the dielectric characteristics of the SIW resonators with the different thicknesses. With the presented method, the time expense for the conventional dielectric characterization method with cross-sectioning is reduced

Highly selective porous separator with thin skin layer for alkaline water electrolysis

© 2022Advanced porous separators with thin selective skin layers to reduce the hydrogen permeation are developed for applications in alkaline water electrolysis. A thin skin layer based on crosslinked polyvinyl alcohol (cPVA) is fabricated on a porous substrate by a facile and scalable ultrasonic spray coating process. As the number of ultrasonic spraying cycles increases, the resulting separator demonstrates a decrease in the large-diameter pore fraction, an increase in the bubble-point pressure, and a reduction in the hydrogen permeability without a significant increase in the areal resistance. As a result, the optimized separator with a cPVA skin layer combines a low ionic resistance of 0.267 Ω cm2, a high bubble point pressure of 2.71 bar, and a low hydrogen permeability of 1.12 × 10−11 mol cm−2 s−1 bar−1. The electrolytic cell assembled with cPVAZ-30 achieves current densities of 861 mA cm−2 and 1890 mA cm−2 at 2.0 V and 2.6 V, respectively, in a 30 wt% KOH electrolyte solution at 80 °C.Y