Testing and demonstration of model predictive control applied to a radiant slab cooling system in a building test facility

Radiant slab systems have the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption in buildings. However, control of radiant slab systems is challenging. Classical feedback control is inadequate due to the large thermal inertia of the systems and heuristic feed-forward control often leads to unacceptable indoor comfort and may not achieve the full energy savings potential. Model predictive control (MPC) is now attracting increasing interest in the building industry and holds promise for radiant systems. However, an often-cited barrier to its implementation in the building industry is the high computational cost and complexity relative to the feedback controls used in conventional systems. The objectives of this study were to (i) verify the correct operation of an open source MPC toolchain developed for radiant slab systems, and (ii) demonstrate its efficacy in a test facility. A matched pair of cells in the FLEXLAB building test facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was used in the study. The proposed MPC toolchain was implemented in one cell and the performance compared to that of the other cell, which used a conventional heuristic control strategy. The results showed that the simplified MPC approach applied in the toolchain worked as expected and realized energy savings over the conventional control strategy. The MPC yielded 42% chilled water pump power reduction and 16% cooling thermal energy savings, while maintaining equal or better indoor comfort

Tagging the p n -> d phi reaction by backward protons in p d -> d phi p_{sp} processes

The reaction p d -> d phi p_{sp} is studied within the Bethe-Salpeter formalism. Under special kinematical conditions (slow backward spectator proton p_{sp} and fast forward deuteron) relevant for forthcoming experiments at COSY, the cross section and a set of polarization observables factorize in the contribution of the pure subprocess p n -> d phi and a contribution stemming from deuteron quantities and kinematical factors. This provides a theoretical basis for studying threshold-near processes at quasi-free neutrons

Low-Profile Ultra-Wideband Directional Dipole Antenna as a Feed for Reflectors in Radio Telescopes

In this paper, a small top plate is found useful to improve the impedance bandwidth of an ultra-wideband dipole antenna horizontally above a ground plane. A linearly-polarized prototype based on this new and simple design methodology can operate over nearly 3.5:1 bandwidth with return losses better than 10 dB, and with nearly stable radiation patterns, high BOR1 efficiency and aperture efficiency over the entire operating band

A dual-band slotted trapezoidal inverted-F antenna for indoor WLAN communications

This letter presents a new directional dual-band slotted trapezoidal inverted-F antenna (IFA) for indoor Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) applications. The dual-band performance can be obtained by tuning the lengths of the inner symmetrical trapezoidal slots and the outer trapezoidal arms in a nearly independent manner. The measured results show that the proposed antenna can provide two separate impedance bandwidths (return loss better than 10 dB) around 180MHz and 750MHz for 2.4/5.1-5.8 GHz WLAN bands, respectively. Good radiation performance and roughly constant in-band antenna directivities are also observed

Doping dependence of phonon and quasiparticle heat transport of pure and Dy-doped Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+\delta} single crystals

The temperature and magnetic-field (H) dependences of thermal conductivity (\kappa) of Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+\delta} (Bi2212) are systematically measured for a broad doping range by using both pure Bi2212 single crystals with tuned oxygen contents and Bi_2Sr_2Ca_{1-x}Dy_xCu_2O_{8+\delta} (Dy-Bi2212) single crystals with different Dy contents x. In the underdoped samples, the quasiparticle (QP) peak below T_c is strongly suppressed, indicating strong QP scattering by impurities or oxygen defects, whereas the phonon conductivity is enhanced in moderately Dy-doped samples and a phonon peak at 10 K is observed for the first time in Bi2212 system, which means Dy^{3+} ions not only introduce the impurities or point defects but also stabilize the crystal lattice. The subkelvin data show that the QP heat conductivity gradually decreases upon lowering the hole doping level. The magnetic-field dependence of \kappa at temperature above 5 K is mainly due to the QP scattering off vortices. While the underdoped pure Bi2212 show very weak field dependence of \kappa, the Dy-doped samples present an additional "dip"-like term of \kappa(H) at low field, which is discussed to be related to the phonon scattering by free spins of Dy^{3+} ions. For non-superconducting Dy-Bi2212 samples with x \simeq 0.50, an interesting "plateau" feature shows up in the low-T \kappa(H) isotherms with characteristic field at 1 -- 2 T, for which we discuss the possible revlevance of magnon excitations.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Discrete Razumikhin-type technique and stability of the Euler-Maruyama method to stochastic functional differential equations

A discrete stochastic Razumikhin-type theorem is established to investigate whether the Euler--Maruyama (EM) scheme can reproduce the moment exponential stability of exact solutions of stochastic functional differential equations (SFDEs). In addition, the Chebyshev inequality and the Borel-Cantelli lemma are applied to show the almost sure stability of the EM approximate solutions of SFDEs. To show our idea clearly, these results are used to discuss stability of numerical solutions of two classes of special SFDEs, including stochastic delay differential equations (SDDEs) with variable delay and stochastically perturbed equations