Technological learning in bioenergy systems

The main goal of this article is to determine whether cost reductions in different bioenergy systems can be quantified using the experience curve approach, and how specific issues (arising from the complexity of biomass energy systems) can be addressed. This is pursued by case studies on biofuelled combined heat and power (CHP) plants in Sweden, global development of fluidized bed boilers and Danish biogas plants. As secondary goal, the aim is to identify learning mechanisms behind technology development and cost reduction for the biomass energy systems investigated. The case studies reveal large difficulties to devise empirical experience curves for investment costs of biomass-fuelled power plants. To some extent, this is due to lack of (detailed) data. The main reason, however, are varying plant costs due to differences in scale, fuel type, plant layout, region etc. For fluidized bed boiler plants built on a global level, progress ratios (PRs) for the price of entire plants lies approximately between 90–93% (which is typical for large plant-like technologies). The costs for the boiler section alone was found to decline much faster. The experience curve approach delivers better results, when the production costs of the final energy carrier are analyzed. Electricity from biofuelled CHP-plants yields PRs of 91–92%, i.e. an 8–9% reduction of electricity production costs with each cumulative doubling of electricity production. The experience curve for biogas production displays a PR of 85% from 1984 to the beginning of 1990, and then levels to approximately 100% until 2002. For technologies developed on a local level (e.g. biogas plants), learning-by-using and learning-by-interacting are important learning mechanism, while for CHP plants utilizing fluidized bed boilers, upscaling is probably one of the main mechanisms behind cost reductions.     

Hypergeometric Functions and Parabolic Partial Differential Equations

We investigate the summability of formal power series solutions of parabolic linear partial differential equations with exponential coefficients.2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 35C10, 35C20.This research was supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship of the European Community program Improving Human Research Potential under contract number HPMF-CT-2002-01818.     

An Evolutionary Method for Synthesizing Low-Sensitivity Lossless Matching Networks

Whereas the present practice of designing matching networks for antennas is limited to conventional topologies, requiring a significant amount of domain knowledge, evolutionary algorithms can be used for automatically identifying unconventional designs that are more effective than would otherwise be developed. In this work, an automatic method to design lossless matching networks driven by an evolutionary algorithm (EA) that considers the sensitivities of the network parameters during the synthesis process is presented. To this end, a closed-form expression for the transducer power gain (TPG) sensitivity with respect to the component values is employed in such a way that the effects of the components tolerance on the matching network performance can easily be quantified. A 3D data structure based on the adjacency matrix is conveniently used to represent any type of network topologies. The proposed EA employs a novel set of topology variation operators, tailored for changing the circuit topology, and an association step, with the aim of reducing the number of nodes of the matching circuit. The efficiency of the proposed EA is tested in the synthesis of an impedance matching network for a VHF monopole whip antenna. This study’s results indicate a matching bandwidth improvement, a more uniformly distributed TPG along the operation frequency band and a more stable TPG regarding the components tolerance compared to the results obtained by previous approaches.     

Information and Telecommunications Project for a Digital City: A Brazilian case study

Making information and telecommunications available is a permanent challenge for cities concerned to their social, urban and local planning and development, focused on life quality of their citizens and on the effectiveness of public management. Such a challenge requires the involvement of everyone in the city. The objective is to describe the information and telecommunications project from the planning of a digital city carried out in Vinhedo-SP, Brazil. It was built as a telecommunications infrastructure of the kind of “open access metropolitan area networks” which enables the integration of citizens in a single telecommunications environment. The research methodology was emphasized by a case study which turned to be a research-action, comprising the municipal administration and its local units. The results achieved describe, by means of a methodology, the phases, sub-phases, activities, approval points and resulting products, and formalize their respective challenges and difficulties. The contributions have to do with the practical feasibility of the project and execution of its methodology. The conclusion reiterates the importance of the project, collectively implemented and accepted, as a tool to help the management of cities, in the implementation of Strategic Digital City Projects, in the decisions of public administration managers, and in the quality of life of their citizens.     

Incorporating Uncertainty via Hierarchical Classification Using Fuzzy Decision Trees

Object hierarchy is often ignored when collecting and classifying geographical objects. Object attributes are defined on the basis of uncertain parameters that may change in space and time. In this paper, we consider fuzzy decision trees for classification and a Bayesian hierarchical model for modeling and handling uncertainty. The study is illustrated with dynamic geographical objects from a coastal management application in the northern part of The Netherlands. Hierarchical modeling is applied to obtain posterior distributions for several boundary regions. The posterior distributions yield lower and upper limits of membership functions describing boundaries between object classes. In this way, a proper fuzzy decision tree for the coastal management application is built, which includes the inherent dynamic uncertainty     

压电作动器在微力微位移装置中的应用

在微力微位移装置中采用闭环控制压电作动器实现微位移进给和微力加载，设计了加载机构，建立加载机构的压电作动器输入电压、加载装置输位移和输出力之间的关系。通过电容测位移仪检测输出位移，实验得到加载系统刚度，根据压电作动器输入电压、加载装置刚度，计算出加载力大小。该方法为微机械力学性能测试仪打下了基础。     

Near-zero triangular location through time-slotted mobility prediction

To setup efficient wireless mesh networks, it is fundamental to limit the overhead needed to localize a mobile user. A promising approach is to rely on a rendezvous-based location system where the current location of a mobile node is stored at specific nodes called locators. Nevertheless, such a solution has a drawback, which happens when the locator is far from the source–destination shortest path. This results in a triangular location problem and consequently in increased overhead of signaling messages. One solution to prevent this problem would be to place the locator as close as possible to the mobile node. This requires however to predict the mobile node’s location at all times. To obtain such information, we define a mobility prediction model (an agenda) that, for each node, specifies the mesh router that is likely to be the closest to the mobile node at specific time periods. The location service that we propose formalizes the integration of the agenda with the management of location servers in a coherent and self-organized fashion. To evaluate the performance of our system compared to traditional approaches, we use two real-life mobility datasets of Wi-Fi devices in the Dartmouth campus and Taxicabs in the bay area of San Francisco. We show that our strategy significantly outperforms traditional solutions; we obtain gains ranging from 39 to 72% compared to the centralized scheme and more than 35% compared to a traditional rendezvous-based solution.     

Silicon oxynitride planar waveguiding structures for application inoptical communication

The refractive index of silicon oxynitride (SiON), a widely used material for integrated optics devices, can be chosen in a wide range between 1.45-2.0. We describe how the consequent large design freedom can be exploited on the one hand for a “standard” polarization independent optical channel waveguide having a favorable tradeoff between efficient fiberchip coupling and small bend radii (compact devices) and on the other hand for special-purpose and hybrid components where the refractive index should be finely adjusted for obtaining the desired functionality. We illustrate the applicability of SiON by describing a few devices for optical filtering in a new architecture for wavelength multiplexing, modulation, polarization splitting and second-harmonic generation     

Solar-blind UV photodetectors for large area applications

In this paper, we extensively investigate a family of solar-blind thin-film photodetectors optimized for the ultraviolet spectrum (UV). The devices are p-i-n structures made of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) and silicon carbide (a-SiC:H) on a glass substrate. At room temperature the photodetectors exhibit values of quantum efficiency of 20% at λ=187 nm, and are transparent to visible radiation. The excellent sensitivity of the device at short wavelengths is explained within the framework of a diffusive model of transport, taking into account the effects of hot carrier relaxation. The rejection of visible light is obtained with an appropriate design of the energy gap and intrinsic layer thickness. The great advantage of this technology lies in the possibility to produce low-cost, large-area arrays of photodetectors