Potential of renewable energy system utilisation at decentralised level in the state of Uttarakhand in India

ABSTRACT

Design and implementation of an effective dissemination programme for decentralised renewable energy system necessitate an accurate estimate of its utilisation potential. Hence, in this study, an attempt has been made to develop frameworks to estimate the utilisation potential of decentralised renewable energy systems in the state of Uttarakhand in India. Estimations imply large resource, technical and economic potentials of the domestic solar water heater, solar home system, solar lantern, family size biogas plant and improved biomass cookstove in Uttarakhand. With higher impact on the purchasing power of households, prevailing soft loan scheme has been found to be more appropriate than a capital subsidy for promoting the usage of decentralised renewable energy systems.     

Compressed sensing of complex-valued data

Compressed sensing (CS) is a recently proposed technique that allows the reconstruction of a signal sampled in violation of the traditional Nyquist criterion. It has immediate applications in reduction of acquisition time for measurements, simplification of hardware, reduction of memory space required for data storage, etc. CS has been applied usually by considering real-valued data. However, complex-valued data are very common in practice, such as terahertz (THz) imaging, synthetic aperture radar and sonar, holography, etc. In such cases CS is applied by decoupling real and imaginary parts or using amplitude constraints. Recently, it was shown in the literature that the quality of reconstruction for THz imaging can be improved by applying smoothness constraint on phase as well as amplitude. In this paper, we propose a general l_p minimization recovery algorithm for CS, which can deal with complex data and smooth the amplitude and phase of the data at the same time as well has the additional feature of using a separate sparsity promoting basis such as wavelets. Thus, objects can be better detected from limited noisy measurements, which are useful for surveillance systems.     

Structural dependence of crystallization in glasses along the nepheline (NaAlSiO4) ‐ eucryptite (LiAlSiO4) join

Lithium and sodium aluminosilicates are important glass‐forming systems for commercial glass‐ceramics, as well as being important model systems for ion transport in battery studies. In addition, uncontrolled crystallization of LiAlSiO₄ (eucryptite) in high‐Li₂O compositions, analogous to the more well‐known problem of NaAlSiO₄ (nepheline) crystallization, can cause concerns for long‐term chemical durability in nuclear waste glasses. To study the relationships between glass structure and crystallization, nine glasses were synthesized in the Li_xNa_1‐xAlSiO₄ series, from x = 0 to x = 1. Raman spectra, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy (Li‐7, Na‐23, Al‐27, Si‐29), and X‐ray diffraction were used to study the quenched and heat‐treated glasses. It was found that different LiAlSiO₄ and NaAlSiO₄ crystal phases crystallize from the glass depending on the Li/Na ratio. Raman and NMR spectra of quenched glasses suggest similar structures regardless of alkali substitution. Li‐7 and Na‐23 NMR spectra of the glass‐ceramics near the endmember compositions show evidence of several differentiable sites distinct from known Li_xNa_1‐xAlSiO₄ crystalline phases, suggesting that these measurements can reveal subtle chemical environment differences in mixed‐alkali systems, similar to what has been observed for zeolites.     

Elucidating the Effect of Iron Speciation (Fe2+/Fe3+) on Crystallization Kinetics of Sodium Aluminosilicate Glasses

We report on the influence of Fe₂O₃ on the crystallization kinetics of nepheline (Na₂O·Al₂O₃·2SiO₂)‐based sodium aluminosilicate glasses. A series of glasses with varying Al₂O₃/Fe₂O₃ content were synthesized in the system 25Na₂O–(25–x) Al₂O₃–xFe₂O₃–50SiO₂ (x varies between 0 and 5 mol%) through melt‐quench technique. A systematic set of experiments were performed to elucidate the influence of iron speciation (Fe²⁺/Fe³⁺) on the crystallization kinetics of these glasses including: (1) obtaining the details of nonisothermal crystallization kinetics by differential scanning calorimetry, (2) determining the influence of heat treatment on the structure and iron coordination in glasses by X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy and wet chemistry, and (3) following the crystalline phase evolution in glasses in air and inert environments by X‐ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. The crystallization of two polymorphs of NaAlSiO₄—carnegieite (orthorhombic) and nepheline (hexagonal)—was observed in all the glasses, wherein the incorporation of iron promotes the formation of nepheline over carnegieite while shifting the crystallization mechanism from surface to volume. The influence of environment (air versus inert) and iron content on the crystallization kinetics of these glasses is contextualized from the perspective of the devitrification problem usually observed in sodium‐ and alumina‐rich high level nuclear waste glasses.     

Improved Nyquist-I Pulses to Enhance the Performance of OFDM-Based Systems

Wireless Personal Communications - Pulse shaping is used in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based systems to reduce inter-carrier interference (ICI) power and peak-to-average...     

Performance of Energy-Efficient Cooperative MAC Protocol with Power Backoff in MANETs

This paper presents an energy-efficient cooperative MAC (EECO-MAC) protocol using power control in mobile ad hoc networks. Cooperative communications improve network performance by taking full advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless channels. The power control technique improves the network lifetime by adjusting the transmission power dynamically. We propose the best partnership selection algorithm, which takes energy consumption into consideration for selection of the optimal cooperative helper to join in the transmission. Through exchanging control packets, the optimal transmission power is allocated for senders to transmit data packets to receivers. In order to enhance energy saving, space–time backoff and time–space backoff algorithms are proposed. Simulation results show that EECO-MAC consumes less energy and prolongs the network lifetime compared to IEEE 802.11 DCF and CoopMAC at the cost of delay. Performance improvement offered by our proposed protocol is apparent in congested networks where nodes have low and limited energy.