Mapping past,current and future energy research trend in Pakistan: a scientometric assessment

This work describes the contribution of researchers in the field of the energy from Pakistan in the period 1990–2016. A scientometric approach was applied to analyze the scientific publications in the field using the Scopus Elsevier database. Different aspects of the publications were analyzed, such as publication type, major research areas, journals, citations, authorship pattern, affiliations as well as the keyword occurrence frequency. The present research trends are analyzed and future research directions are outlined. The impact factor, h-index and number of citations were used to investigate the strength of active institutes, authors, and journals in the field of the energy in Pakistan. From 1990 to 2016, 991 articles have been published by 2139 authors from 213 research institutes. The total number of citations and impact factor are 10,287 and 2301 respectively, corresponding to 10 citations per paper and an impact factor of 2.32 per publication. The research articles originate primarily from COMSATS, NUST, PIEAS, and PINSTECH. Pakistan has published 60% of publication with the collaboration of the foreign institutes, mainly from the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Malaysia. The core research activities in the field are mainly focused on resource assessment, energy policy, energy efficiency, feasibility study, energy economics, and performance assessment. The most productive journal, author, institution, are renewable & sustainable energy review, Shahbaz M., and COMSATS, respectively.     

Citation burst prediction in a bibliometric network

Scientometrics - In the field of computer science, both journal and conference publications are considered valuable. The popularity of an author is mostly determined by the paper’s high...     

A review on graphene and its derivatives as the forerunner of the two-dimensional material family for the future

Journal of Materials Science - In 2004, Geim and Novoselov discovered two-dimensional graphene comprised of sp2 carbon atoms. Graphene is a thin layer of carbon consisting of excellent surface...     

Novel NiO/ZnO/Fe2O3 white light-emitting phosphor: facile synthesis,color-tunable photoluminescence and robust photocatalytic activity

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - The NiO/ZnO/Fe2O3 ternary nanocomposites with different molar ratios (1:1:1), (2:1:1), (3:1:1) and (4:1:1) were synthesized by...     

Compact triband slotted printed monopole antenna for WLAN and WiMAX applications

This work presents a triband antenna, which is compact, low profile, and covers the bandwidth requirements for WLAN and WiMAX applications. The proposed design is a modified and miniaturized printed monopole antenna. It consists of beveling rectangular patch, a Pi‐shape slot element, and an inverted‐L slot element to achieve resonance in three bands. The physical size of the antenna is 27.5 × 20 mm² while the electrical size is 0.26 λ₀ × 0.23 λ₀ at the lower operating frequency which is very compact as compared to other triband designs. It works in three bands, that is, 2.37 to 2.52 GHz, 3.35 to 3.90 GHz, and 4.97 to 7.85 GHz with |S₁₁| < ? 10 dB within these operating bands. The prototype of the proposed miniaturized antenna has been fabricated and the measured results are provided for validation. Antenna performance is studied in terms of input match, gain, radiation efficiency, surface current distributions, and radiation pattern. The antenna shows a nearly omnidirectional radiation pattern with peak efficiency of 90% and acceptable gain of 4 dBi over the three operating bands of WLAN and WiMAX. The prototype of the antenna is fabricated, and simulated results have been verified through measurements.     

Resonant responses of three-layered shear-deformable microbeams

Microsystem Technologies - This paper analyses the coupled resonant motion of three-layered shear-deformable microbeams. On the basis of the modified couple stress theory, while both the rotational...     

Femtojoule-Power-Consuming Synaptic Memtransistor Based on Mott Transition of Multiphasic Vanadium Oxides

To realize the potential of Mott transition of multiphasic vanadium oxides (VO_x) for memory applications, the development of VO_x memtransistors on SiO₂ wafer is introduced. Through electrical characterizations, the volatile memory behaviors of the VO_x memtransistors are observed in both two- and three-terminal measurements. Their capacitive memory and resistive switching mechanisms are strongly related to the mixed VO_x/SiO₂ interface (called VSiO_x). VSiO_x supports the Mott transition in VO_x at low bias voltages (<0.5 V), leading to the low power consumption of the memtransistor. Moreover, the fast switching time (≈35 ns) and tunable memory retention with the synaptic functions (potentiation and depression) of the memtransistors (by using the gate and drain biases) are demonstrated. Overall, the findings open up major opportunities for constructing ultrafast and femto-joule power-consuming neuromorphic devices.     

Optimal multi-dimensional vector bin packing using simulated evolution

The use of the evolutionary heuristic simulated evolution for the optimization of the multi-dimensional vector bin packing problem, which is encountered in several industrial applications, is described. These applications range from production planning and steel fabrication to assignment of virtual machines (VMs) onto physical hosts at cloud-based data centers. The dimensions of VMs can include demands of CPU, memory, bandwidth, disk space etc. The generalized goodness functions that aid traversing the search space in an intelligent manner are designed to cater to the multidimensional nature of items (VMs). The efficiency of heuristics is tested by considering phase transition in the generation of difficult test cases. The quality of the heuristics is judged by determining how close the solution is to the estimated lower bound. A new implementation of a tighter lower bound is proposed. Experiments show that superior quality results are obtained by employing the proposed strategy.     

Dehydrogenation of ethane to ethylene via radical pathways enhanced by alkali metal based catalyst in oxysteam condition

The dehydrogenation of ethane to ethylene in the presence of oxygen and water was conducted using Na₂WO₄/SiO₂ catalyst at high temperatures. At 923 K, the conversion rate without water was proportional to ethane pressure and a half order of oxygen pressure, consistent with a kinetically relevant step where an ethane molecule is activated with dissociated oxygen on the surface. When water was present, the ethane conversion rate was drastically enhanced. An additional term in the rate expression was proportional to a quarter of the oxygen pressure and a half order of the water pressure. This mechanism is consistent with the quasi‐equilibrated OH radical formation with subsequent ethane activation. The attainable yield can be accurately described by taking the water contribution into consideration. At high conversion levels at 1073 K, the C₂H₄ yield exceeded 60% in a single‐pass conversion. The C₂H₄ selectivity was almost insensitive to the C₂H₆ and O₂ pressures. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 63: 105–110, 2017     

Modeling of Effective Thermal Conductivity of Dunite Rocks as a Function of Temperature

The thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, and heat capacity per unit volume of dunite rocks taken from Chillas near Gilgit, Pakistan, have been measured simultaneously using the transient plane source technique. The temperature dependence of the thermal transport properties was studied in the temperature range from 303 K to 483 K. Different relations for the estimation of the thermal conductivity are applied. A proposed model for the prediction of the thermal conductivity as a function of temperature is also given. It is observed that the values of the effective thermal conductivity predicted by the proposed model are in agreement with the experimental thermal conductivity data within 9%.