Li-decorated double vacancy graphene for hydrogen storage application: A first principles study

Lithium decoration is an effective strategy for improving the hydrogen adsorption binding energy and the storage capacity in carbon nanostructures. Here, it is shown that Li-decorated double carbon vacancy graphene (DVG) can be used as an efficient hydrogen storage medium by means of Density Functional Theory (DFT) based calculations. The Li binding energy in DVG is 4.04 eV, which is much higher than that of pristine graphene. A maximum of four hydrogen molecules adsorb on Li decorated on one side of DVG and this leads to a gravimetric storage capacity of 3.89 wt% with an average adsorption binding energy of 0.23 eV/H₂. When Li is decorated on both sides of DVG, the gravimetric storage capacity reaches 7.26 wt% with a binding energy of 0.26 eV/H₂ which shows that desorption would take place at ambient conditions.     

An unsteady MHD flow of a second-grade fluid passing through a porous medium in the presence of radiation absorption exhibits Hall and ion slip effects

In the presence of radiation absorption, we analyzed the effects of Hall and ion slip effects on an unsteady laminar magnetohydrodynamics convective rotating flow of heat-producing or absorbing second-grade fluid across an inclined moving permeable surface in the presence of chemical reaction and radiation absorption. Using the perturbation method, the nondimensional equations for the governing flow are solved to the most excellent conceivable investigative answer. The effects of various factors on velocity, temperature, and concentration are visually and explored in depth. Shear stresses, Nusselt number, and Sherwood number are calculated analytically, rendered computationally in a tabular style, and discussed concerning the essential characteristics for engineering inquiry. It is inferred that an increase in radiation absorption, Hall, and ion slip parameters across the fluid area leads to a rise in the resulting velocity. The thermal and solutal buoyancy forces contribute to the resultant velocity, constantly growing to a very high level. The rotation parameter is used to reduce skin friction, while the Hall and ion slip effects enhance it. The rate of mass transfer increases when the chemical reaction parameter is raised.     

An optical interconnection network and a modified snooping protocol for the design of large-scale symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs)

In symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs), the cache coherence overhead and the speed of the shared buses limit the address/snoop bandwidth needed to broadcast transactions to all processors. As a solution, a scalable address subnetwork called symmetric multiprocessor network (SYMNET) is proposed in which address requests and snoop responses of SMPs are implemented optically. SYMNET not only uses passive optical interconnects that increases the speed of the proposed network, but also pipelines address requests at a much faster rate than electronics. This increases the address bandwidth for snooping, but the preservation of cache coherence can no longer be maintained with the usual snooping protocols. A modified coherence protocol, coherence in SYMNET (COSYM), is introduced to solve the coherence problem. COSYM was evaluated with a subset of Splash-2 benchmarks and compared with the electrical bus-based MOESI protocol. The simulation studies have shown a 5-66 percent improvement in execution time for COSYM as compared to MOESI for various applications. Simulations have also shown that the average latency for a transaction to complete using COSYM protocol was 5-78 percent better than the MOESI protocol. It is also seen that SYMNET can scale up to hundreds of processors while still using fast snooping-based cache coherence protocols, and additional performance gains may be attained with further improvement in optical device technology.     

SYMNET: an optical interconnection network for scalable high-performance symmetric multiprocessors

We address the primary limitation of the bandwidth to satisfy the demands for address transactions in future cache-coherent symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs). It is widely known that the bus speed and the coherence overhead limit the snoop/address bandwidth needed to broadcast address transactions to all processors. As a solution, we propose a scalable address subnetwork called symmetric multiprocessor network (SYMNET) in which address requests and snoop responses of SMPs are implemented optically. SYMNET not only has the ability to pipeline address requests, but also multiple address requests from different processors can propagate through the address subnetwork simultaneously. This is in contrast with all electrical bus-based SMPs, where only a single request is broadcast on the physical address bus at any given point in time. The simultaneous propagation of multiple address requests in SYMNET increases the available address bandwidth and lowers the latency of the network, but the preservation of cache coherence can no longer be maintained with the usual fast snooping protocols. A modified snooping cache-coherence protocol, coherence in SYMNET (COSYM) is introduced to solve the coherence problem. We evaluated SYMNET with a subset of Splash-2 benchmarks and compared it with the electrical bus-based MOESI (modified, owned, exclusive, shared, invalid) protocol. Our simulation studies have shown a 5-66% improvement in execution time for COSYM as compared with MOESI for various applications. Simulations have also shown that the average latency for a transaction to complete by use of COSYM protocol was 5-78% better than the MOESI protocol. SYMNET can scale up to hundreds of processors while still using fast snooping-based cache-coherence protocols, and additional performance gains may be attained with further improvement in optical device technology.     

Proposed Low-Power High-Speed Microring Resonator-Based Switching Technique for Dynamically Reconfigurable Optical Interconnects

The dynamic bandwidth re-allocation (DBR) technique balances traffic by re-allocating bandwidth from under-utilized links to over-utilized links in a network. In this letter, we propose a nonblocking, fast, low-power, and integratable optical switch that enables DBR. The basic building blocks of the proposed switch are silicon-on-insulator-based microring resonators. Analytical and numerical studies show that the active switch design gives similar performance in throughput and latency, while reducing cost (number of lasers) and area significantly when compared to implementation of DBR with only passive components. There is a slight increase in power (~0.4% for worst-case traffic pattern) using the active switch implementation.     

Unsteady MHD fluid flow past an inclined vertical porous plate in the presence of chemical reaction with aligned magnetic field,radiation, and Soret effects

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the Soret effect due to mixed convection on unsteady magnetohydrodynamics flow past a semi-infinite vertical permeable moving plate in the presence of thermal radiation, heat absorption, and homogenous chemical reaction subjected to variable suction. The plate is assumed to be embedded in a uniform porous medium and moves with a constant velocity in the flow direction in the presence of a transverse magnetic field. The equations governing the flow are transformed into a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations by using the perturbation technique. Graphical results for the velocity distribution, temperature distribution, and concentration distribution based on the numerical solutions are presented and discussed. Also, the effects of various parameters on the skin-friction coefficient and the rate of heat transfer in the form of Nusselt number, and rate of mass transfer in the form of Sherwood number at the surface are discussed. Velocity distribution is observed to increase with an increase in Soret number and in the presence of permeability, whereas it shows reverse effects in the case of the aligned magnetic field, inclined parameter, heat absorption coefficient, magnetic parameter, radiation parameter, and chemical reaction parameter.     

Activated carbon load equalization of gas-phase toluene: effect of cycle length and fraction of time in loading

Fluctuating pollutant concentrations pose challenges in the design and operation of air pollution control devices such as biofilters. Effective load equalization could decrease or eliminate many of these difficulties. In research described here, experiments were conducted to evaluate effects of cycle length and fraction of time contaminants are supplied on the degree of load equalization achieved by passively operated granular activated carbon (GAC) beds. Columns packed with Calgon BPL 4 x 6 mesh GAC were subjected to a variety of cyclic loading conditions in which toluene was supplied at concentrations of 1000 or 250 ppm, during loading intervals, and uncontaminated air flowed through the columns during no-loading intervals. The fraction of time when toluene was supplied ranged from 1/2 to 1/6, and cycle lengths ranged from 6 to 48 h. Results demonstrate that passively operated GAC columns can temporarily accumulate contaminants during intervals of high influent concentration and desorb contaminants during intervals of no loading, resulting in appreciable load equalization without need for external regeneration by heating or other means. Greater load equalization was achieved as the fraction of time toluene was loaded decreased and as the cycle length decreased. A pore and surface diffusion model, able to predict the level of contaminant concentration attenuation in GAC columns with reasonable accuracy, was used to further explore the range of load equalization performance expected from columns of various packed bed depths.