Fueling the seaport of the future: Investments in low-carbon energy technologies for operational resilience in seaport multi-energy systems

The ability to withstand and recover from disruptions is essential for seaport energy systems, and in light of the growing push for decarbonization, incorporating clean energy sources has become increasingly imperative to ensure resilience. This paper proposes a resilience enhancement planning strategy for a seaport multi-energy system that integrates various energy modalities and sources, including heating, cooling, hydrogen, solar, and wind power. The planning strategy aims to ensure the reliable operation of the system during contingency events, such as power outages, equipment failures, or extreme weather incidents. The proposed optimization model is designed as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming formulation, in which McCormick inequalities and other linearization techniques are utilized to tackle the model nonlinearities. The model allocates fuel cell electric trucks (FCETs), renewable energy sources, hydrogen refueling stations, and remote control switches such that the system resilience is enhanced while incorporating natural-gas-powered combined cooling, heating, and power system to minimize the operation and unserved demand costs. The model considers various factors such as the availability of renewable energy sources, the demand for heating, cooling, electricity, and hydrogen, the operation of remote control switches to help system reconfiguration, the travel behaviour of FCETs, and the power output of FCETs via vehicle-to-grid interface. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can significantly improve the resilience of the seaport multi-energy system and reduce the risk of service disruptions during contingency scenarios

Electric Power Grid Resilience to Cyber Adversaries: State of the Art

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. The smart electricity grids have been evolving to a more complex cyber-physical ecosystem of infrastructures with integrated communication networks, new carbon-free sources of powergeneratio n, advanced monitoring and control systems, and a myriad of emerging modern physical hardware technologies. With the unprecedented complexity and heterogeneity in dynamic smart grid networks comes additional vulnerability to emerging threats such as cyber attacks. Rapid development and deployment of advanced network monitoring and communication systems on one hand, and the growing interdependence of the electric power grids to a multitude of lifeline critical infrastructures on the other, calls for holistic defense strategies to safeguard the power grids against cyber adversaries. In order to improve the resilience of the power grid against adversarial attacks and cyber intrusions, advancements should be sought on detection techniques, protection plans, and mitigation practices in all electricity generation, transmission, and distribution sectors. This survey discusses such major directions and recent advancements from a lens of different detection techniques, equipment protection plans, and mitigation strategies to enhance the energy delivery infrastructure resilience and operational endurance against cyber attacks. This undertaking is essential since even modest improvements in resilience of the power grid against cyber threats could lead to sizeable monetary savings and an enriched overall social welfare

Electric Power Grids Under High-Absenteeism Pandemics: History, Context, Response, and Opportunities.

Widespread outbreaks of infectious disease, i.e., the so-called pandemics that may travel quickly and silently beyond boundaries, can significantly upsurge the morbidity and mortality over large-scale geographical areas. They commonly result in enormous economic losses, political disruptions, social unrest, and quickly evolve to a national security concern. Societies have been shaped by pandemics and outbreaks for as long as we have had societies. While differing in nature and in realizations, they all place the normal life of modern societies on hold. Common interruptions include job loss, infrastructure failure, and political ramifications. The electric power systems, upon which our modern society relies, is driving a myriad of interdependent services, such as water systems, communication networks, transportation systems, health services, etc. With the sudden shifts in electric power generation and demand portfolios and the need to sustain quality electricity supply to end customers (particularly mission-critical services) during pandemics, safeguarding the nation's electric power grid in the face of such rapidly evolving outbreaks is among the top priorities. This paper explores the various mechanisms through which the electric power grids around the globe are influenced by pandemics in general and COVID-19 in particular, shares the lessons learned and best practices taken in different sectors of the electric industry in responding to the dramatic shifts enforced by such threats, and provides visions for a pandemic-resilient electric grid of the future. [Abstract copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Planning for resilience in power distribution networks: A multi-objective decision support

Power grid response against high-impact low-probability (HILP) events could be enhanced by (a) hardening mechanisms to boost its structural resilience and (b) corrective recovery and mitigation analytics to improve its operational resilience. Planning for structural resilience and attempts to find the optimal location of the Tie switches in radially operated power distribution networks that enable harnessing the network topology for maximised resilience against HILP disasters are focussed. This goal is achieved through a novel resilience-oriented multi-objective decision making platform, which employs a k-PEM based probabilistic power flow (PPF) algorithm. The proposed framework offers a decision making analytic embedded with the fuzzy satisfying method (FSM) that characterises the system resilience features, such as robustness, restoration agility, load criticality, and recovered capacity, to assess different network reconfiguration options and select the optimal solution for implementation. The aforementioned resilience features are formulated in nodal level and then aggregated over the entire system to characterise the system-level objective functions. The performance of the suggested framework is analysed on the IEEE 33-Bus test system under a designated HILP event, and the applicability on larger networks has been verified on the IEEE 69-bus test system. The results demonstrate the efficacy and applicability of the proposed framework in boosting the network resilience against future extremes

Cecal duplication cyst complicated by prolapsed ileocolic intussusception

Cecal duplication cysts are very rare including 0.4 of all GI tract duplications. The ultrasound (US) is the imaging of choice for duplication cysts detection in pediatrics. Cyst's wall is made up of an inner mucosal layer, which is echogenic and an outer muscular layer, which is hypoechoic at US (called �pseudo kidney� appearance on longitudinal view or �doughnut� appearance on transverse view). Intussusception is one of the duplication cyst's complications. Intussusception presented with trans-anal protrusion (prolapsed intussusception) is a rare and confusing condition which can cause delayed diagnosis and further complications. We present an 18-month old boy with Cecal duplication cyst causing intussusception, which protruded from anus. © 2020 The Author

Integrated Comparative Transcriptome and circRNA-lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA ceRNA Regulatory Network Analyses Identify Molecular Mechanisms Associated with Intramuscular Fat Content in Beef Cattle

Publication history: Accepted - 8 August 2023; Published - 11 August 2023.Intramuscular fat content (IMF), one of the most important carcass traits in beef cattle, is controlled by complex regulatory factors. At present, molecular mechanisms involved in regulating IMF and fat metabolism in beef cattle are not well understood. Our objective was to integrate comparative transcriptomic and competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network analyses to identify candidate messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and regulatory RNAs involved in molecular regulation of longissimus dorsi muscle (LDM) tissue for IMF and fat metabolism of 5 beef cattle breeds (Angus, Chinese Simmental, Luxi, Nanyang, and Shandong Black). In total, 34 circRNAs, 57 lncRNAs, 15 miRNAs, and 374 mRNAs were identified by integrating gene ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) enrichment analyses. Furthermore, 7 key subnets with 16 circRNAs, 43 lncRNAs, 7 miRNAs, and 237 mRNAs were detected through clustering analyses, whereas GO enrichment analysis of identified RNAs revealed 48, 13, and 28 significantly enriched GO terms related to IMF in biological process, molecular function, and cellular component categories, respectively. The main metabolic-signaling pathways associated with IMF and fat metabolism that were enriched included metabolic, calcium, cGMP-PKG, thyroid hormone, and oxytocin signaling pathways. Moreover, MCU, CYB5R1, and BAG3 genes were common among the 10 comparative groups defined as important candidate marker genes for fat metabolism in beef cattle. Contributions of transcriptome profiles from various beef breeds and a competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) regulatory network underlying phenotypic differences in IMF provided novel insights into molecular mechanisms associated with meat quality.No external funding

H-, He-like recombination spectra III. n-changing collisions in highly-excited Rydberg states and their impact on the radio, IR and optical recombination lines

At intermediate to high densities, electron (de-)excitation collisions are the dominant process for populating or depopulating high Rydberg states. In particular, the accurate knowledge of the energy changing (n-changing) collisional rates is determinant for predicting the radio recombination spectra of gaseous nebula. The different data sets present in the literature come either from impact parameter calculations or semi-empirical fits and the rate coefficients agree within a factor of 2. We show in this paper that these uncertainties cause errors lower than 5 per cent in the emission of radio recombination lines of most ionized plasmas of typical nebulae. However, in special circumstances where the transitions between Rydberg levels are amplified by maser effects, the errors can increase up to 20 per cent. We present simulations of the optical depth and Hnα line emission of active galactic nuclei broad-line regions and the Orion Nebula Blister to showcase our findings

Space Telescope and Optical Reverberation Mapping Project. XII. Broad-line Region Modeling of NGC 5548

We present geometric and dynamical modeling of the broad line region (BLR) for the multi-wavelength reverberation mapping campaign focused on NGC 5548 in 2014. The data set includes photometric and spectroscopic monitoring in the optical and ultraviolet, covering the Hβ, C iv, and Ly broad emission lines. We find an extended disk-like Hβ BLR with a mixture of near-circular and outflowing gas trajectories, while the C iv and Ly BLRs are much less extended and resemble shell-like structures. There is clear radial structure in the BLR, with C iv and Ly emission arising at smaller radii than the Hβ emission. Using the three lines, we make three independent black hole mass measurements, all of which are consistent. Combining these results gives a joint inference of . We examine the effect of using the V band instead of the UV continuum light curve on the results and find a size difference that is consistent with the measured UV-optical time lag, but the other structural and kinematic parameters remain unchanged, suggesting that the V band is a suitable proxy for the ionizing continuum when exploring the BLR structure and kinematics. Finally, we compare the Hβ results to similar models of data obtained in 2008 when the active galactic nucleus was at a lower luminosity state. We find that the size of the emitting region increased during this time period, but the geometry and black hole mass remained unchanged, which confirms that the BLR kinematics suitably gauge the gravitational field of the central black hole