Novel miniaturized folded UWB microstrip antenna‐based metamaterial for RF energy harvesting

This paper presents a design of an ultra‐wideband (UWB) cylindrical metamaterial (MTM) antenna for radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting to suit the fields of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The patch circuitry is based on 3×5 Hilbert‐shaped MTM unit cells array to enhance the antenna bandwidth. While, the antenna ground plane is defected with an electromagnetic band gap structure to enhance the gain. The antenna is mounted on a polytetrafluoroethylene cylindrical substrate of an outer diameter of 15 mm and length of 32 mm with 1 mm in thickness. The substrate relative permittivity is 2.04, and the loss tangent is 0.0002. The antenna patch and the ground plane structures are printed with silver nanoparticles ink using a ^2.5D CNC plotter machine. The fabricated prototype provides an UWB over the frequency range from 3.77 up to 13.89 GHz with a first separate resonant mode at 3 GHz. The antenna performance is tested numerically using two different software packages of CST MWS and HFSS. Then, an experimental validation is conducted to realize the performance of the proposed antenna in harvesting the RF energy. Excellent conversion efficiency, about 90%, is achieved at 5.8 GHz. Finally, the antenna radiation patterns and S₁₁ spectrum are measured and compared against their simulated results to achieve good agreements.     

Path Capsule Networks

Neural Processing Letters - Capsule network (CapsNet) was introduced as an enhancement over convolutional neural networks, supplementing the latter’s invariance properties with equivariance...     

Radiation pattern control of core shell nanoantenna by manipulation of nonlinear properties

Microsystem Technologies - In this article, a new structure of core–shell spherical nanoparticle as nanoantenna has been evaluated in which the main lobe direction of its radiation pattern is...     

RAID 4SMR: RAID Array with Shingled Magnetic Recording Disk for Mass Storage Systems

One way to increase storage density is using a shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disk. We propose a novel use of SMR disks with RAID (redundant array of independent disks) arrays, specifically building upon and compared with a basic RAID 4 arrangement. The proposed scheme (called RAID 4SMR) has the potential to improve the performance of a traditional RAID 4 array with SMR disks. Our evaluation shows that compared with the standard RAID 4, when using update in-place in RAID arrays, RAID 4SMR with garbage collection not just can allow the adoption of SMR disks with a reduced performance penalty, but offers a performance improvement of up to 56%.

     

320 Gb/s all-optical XOR gate using semiconductor optical amplifier-Mach–Zehnder interferometer and delayed interferometer

Photonic Network Communications - All-optical exclusive OR (XOR) gate with semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and delayed interferometer (DI) is...     

Energy-efficient and Secure Wireless Communication for Telemedicine in IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a radical shifting paradigm for technological innovations as it can play critical roles in cyberspace applications in various sectors, such as security, monitoring, medical, and environmental sectors, and also in control and industrial applications. The IoT in E-medicine unleashed the design space for new technologies to give instant treatment to patients while also monitoring and tracking health conditions. This research presents a system-level architecture approach for IoT energy efficiency and security. The proposed architecture includes functional components that provide privacy management and system security. Components in the security function group provide secure communications through Multi-Authority Ciphertext-Policy Attributes-Based Encryption (MA-CPABE). Because MA-CPABE is assigned to unlimited devices, presuming that the devices are reliable, the user encodes data with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and protects the ABE approach using the solutions of symmetric key. The Johnson’s algorithm with a new computation measure is used to increase network lifetime since an individual sensor node with limited energy represents the inevitable constraints for the broad usage of wireless sensor networks. The optimal route from a source to destination turns out as the cornerstone for longevity of network and its sustainability. To reduce the energy consumption of networks, the evaluation measures consider the node’s residual energy, the number of neighbors, their distance, and the link dependability. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model increases network life by about 12.25% (27.73%) compared to Floyd–Warshall’s, Bellman–Ford’s, and Dijkstra’s algorithms, lowering consumption of energy by eliminating the necessity for re-routing the message as a result of connection failure.     

Properties and durability of alkali-activated slag pastes immersed in sea water

This paper represents the experimental trials to activate blast-furnace slag to produce cementless binding materials. The aims of the work is to study the properties of activated slag mixed with sodium hydroxide and sodium silicate liquid 6 wt% of granulated slag. Also, studying the effect of mixing water (tap and sea water) on the kinetic of activation. The rate of activation of the alkali activated slag (AAS) has been studied by FTIR, TGA, DTG and SEM techniques. The results revealed that the increase of NaOH content and mixing with sea water increase the combined water up to 90 days. On the other hand, the bulk density and compressive strength was increased by increasing Na₂SiO₃ content in presence of NaOH. The activated granulated slag showed good durability in sea water, i.e., the compressive strength increased gradually with immersing time up to 12 months. Whereas, the strength of sulfate resisting cement (SRC) pastes immersed in sea water increases up to 6 months then decreases up to one year. Therefore, it can be concluded that alkali activated slag are more durable in sea water than SRC pastes.     

Reforming of Naphtha Cuts in Small Plants

It is advantageous to construct small distillation plants and reforming units that operate on oxide catalysts (zeolite–aluminosilicate, zeolite, etc.) without circulation of hydrogen in the reaction system for production of high-octane naphthas from crude oil or gas condensates in the conditions of the Far North, Siberia, and the Far East.     

Browning susceptibility of white wine and antioxidant effect of glutathione

Glutathione (GSH) content and other physicochemical parameters of thirteen white wines originated from Lebanon were studied in relation to their browning capacity; the impact of pH, total sulphur dioxide and total phenol content into the browning susceptibility of the wine was shown. The effect of GSH, added to the wine at different concentrations, on the total phenol content was studied at 55 °C during 8 days of accelerated oxidation. GSH addition resulted in significantly higher total phenol content only on day 0 of the test. GSH was shown to be readily oxidised in these conditions: even on day 0, there was a considerable reduction (up to 73%) in GSH level. Moreover, after 8 days of oxidation, GSH concentration in all studied samples ranged from 4.79 to 5.11 mg L^?1; these values were close to GSH value in control wine (without added GSH) on day 0. On the contrary, GSH appeared to contribute significantly to the wine stability, which might have been via the increase of reduced phenolic pool. GSH addition appeared to have an improving effect on the organoleptic qualities of the wine.     

A tolerance method for industrial image-based inspection

Although image-based inspection has been applied to a wide range of industrial applications, inspection accuracy remains a challenging issue due to the complexity involved in industrial inspection. The common method adopted in industry is to use a qualified image as a template image to inspect each live image on a pixel-by-pixel basis. In this paper, a tolerance method is presented to replace the template image method. The said tolerance is formed by two indices computed from a sample image, instead of using the whole image for inspection. To ensure an accurate tolerance zone, a neural networks method is used to take the noise and uncertainties in the images under inspection into consideration. To improve neural networks training speed, the Taguchi method is adopted to select a minimum number of the sample images needed for training. Once a tolerance zone is obtained, live images are inspected against it. If the indices of a live image fall inside the tolerance zone, the part is regarded as good, otherwise defective. Three examples are given: one for auto part inspection, one for label inspection, and one for machining part inspection. The inspection accuracy achieved is above 94%.