Multi‐agent‐based sharing power economy for a smart community

In this paper, a multi‐agent‐based locally administrated power distribution hub (PDH) for social welfare is proposed that optimizes energy consumption, allocation, and management of battery energy storage systems (ESSs) for a smart community. Initially, formulation regarding optimum selection of a power storage system for a home (in terms of storage capacity) is presented. Afterwards, the concept of sharing economy is inducted in the community by demonstrating PDH. PDH is composed of multiple small‐scale battery ESSs (each owned by community users), which are connected together to form a unified‐ESS. Proposed PDH offers a localized switching mechanism that takes decision of whether to buy electricity from utility or use unified‐ESS. This decision is based on the price of electricity at ‘time of use’ and ‘state of charge’ of unified‐ESS. In response to power use or share, electricity bills are created for individual smart homes by incrementing or decrementing respective submeters. There is no buying or selling of power from PDH; there is power sharing with the concept of ‘no profit, no loss’. The objective of the proposed PDH is to limit the purchase of electricity on ‘high priced’ hours from the utility. This not only benefits the utility at crucial hours but also provides effective use of power at the demand side. The proposed multi‐agent system depicts the concept of sharing power economy within a community. Finally, the proposed model is analyzed analytically, considering on‐peak, off‐peak, and mid‐level (mid‐peak) prices of a real‐time price signal during 24 h of a day. Results clearly show vital financial benefits of ‘sharing power economy’ for end users and efficient use of power within the smart community. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of a periodic tangential magnetic field on the stability of a horizontal magnetic fluid sheet

The current article aims at investigating the effect of a periodic tangential magnetic field on the stability of a horizontal flat sheet. The media were considered porous, the three viscous‐fluid layers were initially streaming with uniform velocities, and the magnetic field admitted the presence of free‐surface currents. Furthermore, the transfer of mass and heat phenomenon was taken into account. The analysis, in this paper, was followed by the viscous potential theory. Moreover, the stability of the boundary‐value problem resulted in coupled second‐order linear differential equations with damping and complex coefficients. In regard to the uniform and periodic magnetic field, the standard normal mode approach was applied to deduce a general dispersion relation and judge the stability criteria. In addition, several unfamiliar cases were reported, according to appropriate data choices. The stability conditions were theoretically analyzed, and the influences of the various parameters in the stability profile were identified through a set of diagrams. In accordance wth the oscillating field, the coupled dispersion equations were combined to give the established Mathieu equation. Therefore, the governed transition curves were, theoretically, obtained. Finally, the results were numerically confirmed.     

Atom Probe Tomography of Zinc Oxide Nanowires

Wide-bandgap zinc oxide (ZnO) semiconductors and nanowires have become important materials for electronic and photonic device applications. In this work, we report the growth of well-aligned single-crystal ZnO nanowire arrays on sapphire substrates by chemical vapor deposition and the development of atom probe tomography, an emerging nanoscale characterization method capable of providing deeper insight into the three-dimensional distribution of atoms and impurities within its structure. Using a metal-catalyst-free approach, the influence of the growth parameters on the orientation and density of the nanowires were studied. The resulting ZnO nanowires were determined to be single crystalline, with diameter on the order of 50 nm to 150 nm and length that could be controlled between 0.5 μm to 20 μm. Their density was on the order of high 10⁸ cm⁻² to low 10⁹ cm⁻². In addition to routine characterizations using scanning and transmission electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, photoluminescence, and Raman spectroscopy, we developed the atom probe tomography technique for ZnO nanowires, comparing the voltage pulse and laser pulse modes. In-depth analysis of the data was carried out to determine the accurate chemical composition of the nanowires and reveal the incorporation of nitrogen impurities. The current–voltage characteristics of individual nanowires were measured to determine their electrical properties.     

Physiological and biochemical markers in the process of resistance and/or tolerance of heavy metals in the abandoned mining area of Sidi Kamber,Skikda, Algeria

This paper reports the biomonitoring of metallic pollution in the mine of Sidi Kamber Skikda town, to determine the resistance and/or tolerance to Zn, Pb, Cd and Cu in metalliferous plants. During the period of March–May, 2015, soil and plants samples were collected from three different stations in the study area. The total heavy metal fraction was determined by ICP/MS, whereas biochemical markers were determined by spectrophotometric techniques. The results obtained showed high levels of heavy metals in soil and plants compared to international standards. The translocation factor revealed that the studied plants can transfer and/or accumulate metals in their roots or their aerial parts as a function of characteristics of each metal, soil contents and physiological role in the plant. The contents of chlorophyll, proline, total sugars and total proteins are directly influenced by changes in bioavailable contents of heavy metals. It has been found that the plants studied and biomarkers are better suited for phytoremediation and biomonitoring of heavy metals pollution.     

Copy-move forgery detection of duplicated objects using accurate PCET moments and morphological operators

This paper presents a new method for copy-move forgery detection of duplicated objects. A bounding rectangle is drawn around the detected object to form a sub-image. Morphological operator is used to remove the unnecessary small objects. Highly accurate polar complex exponential transform moments are used as features for the detected objects. Euclidian distance and correlation coefficient between the feature vectors are calculated and used for searching the similar objects. A set of 20 forged images with duplicated objects is carefully selected from previously published works. Additional 80 non-forged images are edited by the authors and forged by duplicating different kinds of objects. Numerical simulation is performed where the results show that the proposed method successfully detect different kinds of duplicated objects. The proposed method is much faster than the previously existing methods. Also, it exhibits high robustness to various attacks such as additive white Gaussian noise, JPEG compression, rotation, and scaling.     

Simulation of driver fatigue monitoring via blink rate detection,using 65 nm CMOS technology

This paper proposes a system to detect and measure blink rate to determine fatigue levels. The method involved analysing specific frames to determine that a blink occurred, and then monitoring the time between successive blinks. The program was simulated in python using a Raspberry Pi Zero and a standard USB camera. For the blink rate detection block, a gate level schematic was implemented in Cadence software using 65 nm CMOS technology. The design was based around an asynchronous 6-bit based edge counter which was designed using D-flip-flops. The simulation calculated the average blink rate and compared this to the most recent blink rate. The outcome would determine if an alarm signal should be sent to the alarm. The system consumed 130 μA from a 1.2 V power supply.     

A bigraphical model for specifying cloud-based elastic systems and their behaviour

The few recent years have witnessed the appearance of a new kind of self-adaptive systems called cloud based-elastic systems. These systems are particularly appealing for their ability to maintain a decent quality of service and reduce a system’s operating cost at the same time. They achieve this by dynamically adjusting resources allocation in terms of elasticity. Meanwhile, complexity of structural and behavioural aspects related to cloud-based elastic systems increase the difficulty of designing and developing such systems. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a formal approach based on bigraphical reactive systems for modelling both structural and behavioural aspects of cloud-based elastic systems. In particular, we represent their behaviour in terms of client/application interactions and elasticity methods at different levels using bigraphical reaction rules. The feasibility of the proposed approach is illustrated through a motivating example running on the top of an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure.     

Mixed convective peristaltic flow of Eyring‐Prandtl fluid with chemical reaction and variable electrical conductivity in a tapered asymmetric channel

The influence of inconstant electrical conductivity and chemical reaction on the peristaltic motion of non‐Newtonian Eyring‐Prandtl fluid inside a tapered asymmetric channel is investigated. The system is concerned by a uniform external magnetic field. The heat and mass transfer are considered. The problem is controlled mathematically by a system of nonlinear partial differential equations which describe the velocity, temperature, and nanoparticle concentration of the fluid. By means of long wavelength and low Reynolds numbers, our system is simplified. It is explained by using the multi‐step differential transform method as a semi‐analytical technique. The distributions of velocity, temperature, nanoparticle concentration, as well as pressure gradient and pressure rise are obtained as a function of the physical parameters of the problem. The effects of these parameters on these distributions are deliberated numerically and illustrated graphically through a set of figures. The results indicate that the parameters play a significant role in controlling the velocity, temperature, nanoparticle concentration, pressure gradient, and pressure rise.     

The processing element design for a large-scale spatio-temporal pattern clustering system

The clustering of spatio-temporal patterns are essential for many applications. Established from the biological analogy of the cortex, the parametrically coupled logistic map network (PCLMN) provides a viable solution to the clustering problem. To engineer for a single-chip spatio-temporal pattern clustering system, the highly modular PCLMN is designed in analog circuit. In this paper, the 0.6 μm 5 V CMOS design of the processing element is presented. The analog design employs self-calibration techniques to improve the accuracy and robustness of the nonlinear circuits. A fabricated element covers a die area of 0.55 mm², and consumes 240 mW power at 5 V supply. After calibration, simulation and testing results show that the element fulfills the system-level requirement of the Cort-X model for driving signals up to 1 MHz.