A new method for power generation planning and problems of uncertainty

This paper presents a new method for power system planning which considers uncertainties of various system parameters as a part of the criterion function. The criterion function involves both the expected values of total system costs and the cost variances of different power plants. Previously, the authors proposed that these cost variances be evaluated from the existing power system plans in the form of the solutions to the inverse optimization problem, and then applied this procedure to the planning of power systems in Japan. However, because of the correlation between fuel and facility costs, the cost variances could not be determined as specific values. Here, to overcome this difficulty, the authors now introduce hydropower plants into the model as the so-called nonrisky elements and focus on the expenditure shares rather than the plant capacity shares. As a result, more reasonable results are obtained. This improved methodology is applied and the derived cost variances are shown. Further, using the resultant cost variances, the authors make Pareto-optimal power generation plans and demonstrate also the robustness of the method to price fluctuations.     

Selectivity in Methanol Oxidation as Studied on Model Systems Involving Vanadium Oxides

Oxidation catalysts are modeled by oxide single crystals, thin oxide films, as well as supported oxide nanoparticles. We characterize the surface of those materials using a variety of surface sensitive techniques including scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy, photoelectron spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, and thermal desorption spectroscopy. We find temperature dependent structural transformations from V₂O₅(001) to V₂O₃(0001) via V₆O₁₃(001). V₂O₃(0001) is found to be vanadyl terminated in an oxygen ambient and it loses the vanadyl termination after electron bombardment. It is shown that the concentration of vanadyl groups controls the selectivity of the methanol oxy-dehydrogenation towards formaldehyde. A proposal for the mechanism is made. The results on single crystalline thin films are compared with similar measurements on deposited vanadia nanoparticles. The experimental results are correlated with theoretical calculations and models.     

Bioactive ceramic coatings containing carbon nanotubes on metallic substrates by electrophoretic deposition

A range of potentially bioactive ceramic coatings, based on combinations of either hydroxyapatite (HA) or titanium oxide nanoparticles with carbon nanotubes (CNTs), have been deposited on metallic substrates, using electrophoretic deposition (EPD). Sol–gel derived, ultrafine HA powders (10–70 nm) were dispersed in multi-wall nanotube-containing ethanol suspensions maintained at pH = ∼3.5 and successfully coated onto Ti alloy wires at 20 V for 1–3 min For TiO₂/CNT coatings, commercially available titania nanopowders and surface-treated CNTs in aqueous suspensions were co-deposited on stainless steel planar substrates. A field strength of 20 V/cm and deposition time of 4 min were used working at pH = 5. Although the co-deposition mechanism was not investigated in detail, the evidence suggests that co-deposition occurs due to the opposite signs of the surface charges (zeta potentials) of the particles, at the working pH. Electrostatic attraction between CNTs and TiO₂ particles leads to the creation of composite particles in suspension, consisting of TiO₂ particles homogenously attached onto the surface of individual CNTs. Under the applied electric field, these net negatively charged “composite TiO₂/CNT” elements migrate to and deposit on the anode (working electrode). The process of EPD at constant voltage conditions was optimised in both systems to achieve homogeneous and reasonably adhered deposits of varying thicknesses on the metallic substrates_.     

SATCHMOREBID: SATCHMO(RE) with BIDirectional relevancy

SATCHMORE was introduced as a mechanism to integrate relevancy testing with the model-generation theorem prover SATCHMO. This made it possible to avoid invoking some clauses that appear in no refutation, which was a major drawback of the SATCHMO approach. SATCHMORE relevancy, however, is driven by the entire set of negative clauses and no distinction is accorded to the query negation. Under unfavorable circumstances, such as in the presence of large amounts of negative data, this can reduce the efficiency of SATCHMORE. In this paper we introduce a further refinement of SATCHMO called SATCHMOREBID: SATCHMORE with BIDirectional relevancy. SATCHMOREBID uses only the negation of the query for relevancy determination at the start. Other negative clauses are introduced on demand and only if a refutation is not possible using the current set of negative clauses. The search for the relevant negative clauses is performed in a forward chaining mode as opposed to relevancy propagation in SATCHMORE which is based on backward chaining. SATCHMOREBID is shown to be refutationally sound and complete. Experiments on a prototype SATCHMOREBID implementation point to its potential to enhance the efficiency of the query answering process in disjunctive databases. Donald Loveland, Ph.D.: He is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from New York University and taught at NYU and CMU prior to joining Duke in 1973. His research in automated deduction includes defining the model elimination proof procedure and the notion of linear resolution. He is author of one book and editor/co-editor of two other books on automated theorem proving. He has done research in the areas of algorithms, complexity, expert systems and logic programming. He is an AAAI Fellow, ACM Fellow and winner of the Herbrand Award in Automated Reasoning. Adnan H. Yahya, Ph.D.: He is an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Birzeit University, Palestine. He received his Diploma and PhD degrees from St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University and Nothwestern University in 1979 and 1984 respectively. His research interests are in Artificial Intelligence in general and in the areas of Deductive Databases, Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning in particular. He had several visiting appointments at universities and research labs in the US, Germany, France and the UK. Adnan Yahya is a member of the ACM, IEEE and IEEE Computer Society.     

Characterization of Clay Particle Surfaces for Contaminant Sorption in Soil Barriers Using Flow Microcalorimetry

Clays such as kaolinite and bentonite are widely used in various industries as sorbents. The sorptive characteristics of clays are exploited when they are used in contaminant barrier systems. To use clays effectively, their surface characteristics need to be known; especially, when they are used for contaminant sorption. Available surface area of clay minerals and the characteristics that depend on it are very sensitive to environmental changes such as those that can be induced by changes in the composition of pore fluid. Flow microcalorimetry with a down-stream concentration was used to determine the heats and amounts of adsorption of acids and bases on the clays. Test results presented herein revealed that both kaolinite and bentonite exhibit significantly different adsorption isotherms and heat of wetting under high pH and low pH conditions. Kaolinite has the capacity to adsorb both acidic and basic molecules almost equally. However, it has a tendency to adsorb more base than acid because of its stronger complexation capacity with acids than with bases. On the other hand, bentonite has a tendency to adsorb more acidic than basic molecules per gram. These results also indicate that both kaolinite and bentonite have different heats of wetting characteristics. As the concentrations of the acids and bases increase, the heat of wetting of kaolinite decreases while that of bentonite increases.     

LXRα Regulates oxLDL-Induced Trained Immunity in Macrophages

Reprogramming of metabolic pathways in monocytes and macrophages can induce a proatherosclerotic inflammatory memory called trained innate immunity. Here, we have analyzed the role of the Liver X receptor (LXR), a crucial regulator of metabolism and inflammation, in oxidized low-density lipoprotein (oxLDL)-induced trained innate immunity. Human monocytes were incubated with LXR agonists, antagonists, and oxLDL for 24 h. After five days of resting time, cells were restimulated with the TLR-2 agonist Pam3cys. OxLDL priming induced the expression of LXRα but not LXRβ. Pharmacologic LXR activation was enhanced, while LXR inhibition prevented the oxLDL-induced inflammatory response. Furthermore, LXR inhibition blocked the metabolic changes necessary for epigenetic reprogramming associated with trained immunity. In fact, enrichment of activating histone marks at the IL-6 and TNFα promotor was reduced following LXR inhibition. Based on the differential expression of the LXR isoforms, we inhibited LXRα and LXRβ genes using siRNA in THP1 cells. As expected, siRNA-mediated knock-down of LXRα blocked the oxLDL-induced inflammatory response, while knock-down of LXRβ had no effect. We demonstrate a specific and novel role of the LXRα isoform in the regulation of oxLDL-induced trained immunity. Our data reveal important aspects of LXR signaling in innate immunity with relevance to atherosclerosis formation.     

Public key cryptography based privacy preserving multi-context RFID infrastructure

In this paper, we propose a novel radio frequency identification (RFID) infrastructure enabling multi-purpose RFID tags realized by the use of privacy preserving public key cryptography (PKC) architecture. The infrastructure ensures that the access rights of the tags are preserved based on the spatial and temporal information collected from the RFID readers. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure with respect to cryptanalytic, impersonation, tracking, replay, and relay attacks. We also analyze the feasibility of PKC implementation on passive class 2 RFID tags, and show that the requirements for PKC are comparable to those of other cryptographic implementations based on symmetric ciphers. Our numerical results indicate PKC based systems can outperform symmetric cipher based systems, since the back end servers can identify RFID tags with PKC based systems approximately 57 times faster than the best symmetric cipher based systems.     

Towards a classification of energy aware MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks

Power management is an important issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) because wireless sensor nodes are usually battery powered, and an efficient use of the available battery power becomes an important concern specially for those applications where the system is expected to operate for long durations. This necessity for energy efficient operation of a WSN has prompted the development of new protocols in all layers of the communication stack. Provided that, the radio transceiver is the most power consuming component of a typical sensor node, large gains can be achieved at the link layer where the medium access control (MAC) protocol controls the usage of the radio transceiver unit. MAC protocols for sensor networks differ greatly from typical wireless networks access protocols in many issues. MAC protocols for sensor networks must have built‐in power conservation, mobility management, and failure recovery strategies. Furthermore, sensor MAC protocols should make performance trade‐off between latency and throughput for a reduction in energy consumption to maximize the lifetime of the network. This is in general achieved through duty cycling the radio transceiver. Many MAC protocols with different objectives were proposed for wireless sensor networks in the literature. Most of these protocols take into account the energy efficiency as a main objective. There is much more innovative work should be done at the MAC layer to address the hard unsolved problems. In this paper, we first outline and discuss the specific requirements and design trade‐offs of a typical wireless sensor MAC protocol by describing the properties of WSN that affect the design of MAC layer protocols. Then, a typical collection of wireless sensor MAC protocols presented in the literature are surveyed, classified, and described emphasizing their advantages and disadvantages whenever possible. Finally, we present research directions and identify open issues for future medium access research. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The physical theory of slope diffraction

The physical theory of diffraction (PTD) has been expanded for the case of slope diffraction, when an incident wave is zero but its derivative is not zero in the direction of a perfectly conducting scattering edge. High frequency asymptotics are found both for elementary edge waves and for the total edge waves scattered by arbitrary curved edges. Great attention is given to fields created by the nonuniform (diffraction) component of edge currents. These fields are usually called ptd corrections to the Physical Optics approach. These corrections are found for diffraction fields in ray regions and in diffraction regions such as the vicinities of shadow boundaries, smooth caustics, and foci.     

Multilayer Graphene Broadband Terahertz Modulators with Flexible Substrate

Fabrication of terahertz modulators as simple devices with high modulation depth across a broad bandwidth is still very challenging. In this study, four different chemical vapor deposition grown multilayer graphene (MLG) modulators based on MLG/ionic liquid/gold sandwich structures have been investigated. Flexible substrates (PVC and PE) were chosen as host materials, and devices were fabricated with three different thicknesses. The resultant MLG devices can be operated at low voltages between 0 and 3.4 V providing nearly complete modulation between 0.2 and 1.5 THz with low insertion losses. Even with such low gate voltages, the devices have been doped significantly inducing 7–11-fold improvement in their sheet conductivities depending on device thickness. In addition, sheet conductivity has been improved more than three times as the graphene layer number increased from 30 to 100. With the demonstration of promising device performances, the proposed modulators can be potential candidates for applications in terahertz and related optoelectronic technologies.