IMPROVEMENT OF THE PERFORMANCE OF A SUPERCONDUCTING TURBOGENERATOR THROUGH USE OF A CONTROLLABLE REACTIVE POWER COMPENSATOR

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the dynamic performance of a superconducting turbo-generator which employes a thyristor controlled static reactive power compensator at its terminals. The application of the fast acting compensator external to the machine, in a power system, is foreseen as one possible alternative to alleviate the excitation problems which arise on account of the extremely large field time constant of a superconducting generator. This application is compatible with the fast development in the rating of static compensators and imminent use of superconducting machines in the future.

The paper dwells on the transient aspects of performance to evaluate the feasibility of use of an external controller for voltage and also incorporating stabilizing signals. Simulation of the load rejection and transient stability dynamic performance of the superconducting alternator with and without thyristor controlled static compensator brings out its superiority over the field forcing techniques usually used with the conventional generators.     

Human SMILE-Derived Stromal Lenticule Scaffold for Regenerative Therapy: Review and Perspectives

A transparent cornea is paramount for vision. Corneal opacity is one of the leading causes of blindness. Although conventional corneal transplantation has been successful in recovering patients’ vision, the outcomes are challenged by a global lack of donor tissue availability. Bioengineered corneal tissues are gaining momentum as a new source for corneal wound healing and scar management. Extracellular matrix (ECM)-scaffold-based engineering offers a new perspective on corneal regenerative medicine. Ultrathin stromal laminar tissues obtained from lenticule-based refractive correction procedures, such as SMall Incision Lenticule Extraction (SMILE), are an accessible and novel source of collagen-rich ECM scaffolds with high mechanical strength, biocompatibility, and transparency. After customization (including decellularization), these lenticules can serve as an acellular scaffold niche to repopulate cells, including stromal keratocytes and stem cells, with functional phenotypes. The intrastromal transplantation of these cell/tissue composites can regenerate native-like corneal stromal tissue and restore corneal transparency. This review highlights the current status of ECM-scaffold-based engineering with cells, along with the development of drug and growth factor delivery systems, and elucidates the potential uses of stromal lenticule scaffolds in regenerative therapeutics.     

Analysis of a Disc-Loaded Circular Waveguide for Interaction Impedance of a Gyrotron Amplifier

A rigorous electromagnetic analysis of a circular waveguide loaded with axially periodic annular discs was developed in the fast-wave regime, considering finite axial disc thickness and taking into account the effect of higher order space harmonics in the disc-free region and higher order modal harmonics in the disc-occupied region of the structure. The quality of the disc-loaded circular waveguide was evaluated with respect to its azimuthal interaction impedance that has relevance to the gain of a gyrotron millimeter-wave amplifier (gyro-traveling-wave tube) in which such a loaded waveguide finds application as a wideband interaction structure. The results of electromagnetic analysis of the structure with respect to both the dispersion and azimuthal interaction impedance characteristics were validated against the commercially available code: high frequency structure simulator (HFSS). The analysis predicts that the value of the interaction impedance at a given frequency decreases with the increase of the disc hole radius and disc periodicity. The change of the axial disc thickness does not significantly change the value of the interaction impedance though it shifts the frequency range over which appreciable interaction impedance is obtained. Out of the three disc parameters, namely the disc hole radius, thickness and periodicity, the lattermost is most effective in controlling the value of the azimuthal interaction impedance. However, the passband of frequencies and the center frequency of the passband both decrease with the increase of the disc periodicity. Moreover, the disc periodicity that provides large azimuthal interaction impedance would in general be different from that giving the desired dispersion shape for wideband interaction in a gyro-TWT, suggesting a trade-off in the value of the disc periodicity to be chosen.     

Design of microstrip hyperbolic line to match a complex impedance to a standard coaxial transmission line

Based on the solution of the Riccati equation, a hyperbolically tapered microstrip transmission line for matching a complex load to a standard coaxial cable is designed. An iterative procedure is used to yield the phase constant leading to an accurate design. A numerical example is considered. The result shows that a tremendous reduction in the size of matching components can be achieved if hyperbolic instead of uniform transmission lines are used. This is highly advantageous in the miniaturization of solid state circuits.     

Parameters to Define the Electron Beam Trajectory of a Double-Tapered Disc-Loaded Wideband Gyro-TWT in Profiled Magnetic Field

In the method of tapering the cross section of the interaction structure for broadbanding a gyro-TWT, the different portions of the interaction length of the tapered-cross-section waveguide become effective for different frequency ranges if the magnetic field and beam parameters are profiled to maintain the condition of electron cyclotron resonance throughout the interaction length. In the present paper, the study of profiling the magnetic field and beam parameters in steps of the stepped analytical model of a double-tapered disc-loaded circular waveguide was made throughout the steps of the model. In the observed profile, the magnetic flux density in a typical step relative to its value in first-step decreases from first-step (gun-end) to end-step (collector-end) of the model considering the up-tapering schemes, in which structure parameters increase from gun-end to collector-end. Also, the transverse beam velocity in a typical step relative to its value in first-step decreases from gun-end to collector-end. However, the Larmor radius in a typical step relative to its value in first-step as well as the hollow-beam radius in a typical step relative to its value in first-step, both increase from gun-end to collector-end in the model considering the up-tapering schemes.     

Perceptual image hashing via feature points: performance evaluation and tradeoffs.

We propose an image hashing paradigm using visually significant feature points. The feature points should be largely invariant under perceptually insignificant distortions. To satisfy this, we propose an iterative feature detector to extract significant geometry preserving feature points. We apply probabilistic quantization on the derived features to introduce randomness, which, in turn, reduces vulnerability to adversarial attacks. The proposed hash algorithm withstands standard benchmark (e.g., Stirmark) attacks, including compression, geometric distortions of scaling and small-angle rotation, and common signal-processing operations. Content changing (malicious) manipulations of image data are also accurately detected. Detailed statistical analysis in the form of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves is presented and reveals the success of the proposed scheme in achieving perceptual robustness while avoiding misclassification.     

G-FANET: an ambient network formation between ground and flying ad hoc networks

In wireless communications, both control information and payload (user-data) are concurrently transmitted and required to be successfully recovered. This paper focuses on block-level detection, which is applicable for detecting transmitted control information, particularly when this information is selected or chosen from a finite set of information that are known at both transmitting and receiving devices. Using an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing architecture, this paper investigates and evaluates the performance of a time-domain decision criterion in comparison with a form of Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation method. Unlike the ML method, the proposed time-domain detection technique requires no channel estimation as it uses the correlation (in the time-domain) that exists between the received and the transmitted selective information as a means of detection. In comparison with the ML method, results show that the proposed method offers improved detection performance, particularly when the control information consists of at least 16. However, the implementation of the proposed method requires a slightly increased number of mathematical computations.     

Efficient data management and control over WSNs using SDN‐enabled aerial networks

The recent developments in collaborative search, acquisition, and tracking have hoisted the geographical barrier. The network between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one such collaboration, which comprises battery‐powered static sensor nodes that act as sources and sinks and UAVs that act as relays. This collaborative network presents with opportunities and advantages, but at the same time, configuration of such networks is an arduous task. The WSN nodes are characterized by constant depleting power. Their network itself requires constant management and reconfiguration. These requisites can be slaked through the formation of an efficient data dissemination algorithm, which acclimates according to the network state. Considering this, a data dissemination approach is presented in this paper, which constructs a virtual topology predicated on the charge of WSN nodes utilizing software‐defined networks (SDNs) through UAVs. The topology is constantly monitored and reconfigured when required. The aerial nodes are equipped with multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) antennas in order to facilitate simultaneous communication with the ground nodes, the base station, and the SDN controller. An efficient sleep timer and backoff counter strategies are also utilized by the proposed approach. The SDN controller facilitates the topology formation and maintenance of a sleep timer and a backoff counter. The proposed model is compared with clustered hierarchical layouts and hexagonal cell layouts through the network simulations. The results suggest significant improvements in the proposed model for various metrics, such as lifetime, delay, latency, delivery ratio, and throughput in comparison with the existing solutions.     

Optimal provisioning for virtual network request in cloud-based data centers

Today applications and services are migrating to a cloud-computing-based paradigm in which the users access the applications and services hosted in data centers, by using thin-clients on the user terminal device. These applications/services are typically hosted and run on virtual machines in interconnected data centers. Different applications from the same user may need to access and change shared data or information. Thus, we may abstract the applications from same user as a virtual network (VN). For better performance and efficiency, it is critical that the VN request be accommodated with optimal provisioning under the current resource state of data centers. In this paper, for addressing the issue of how to design an optimal provisioning scheme for the VN request such that the total revenue of is maximized, we first develop a framework for the optimal provisioning of VN request by using mixed integer programming. Since the optimal provisioning problem is NP-hard, we also propose a genetic algorithm?Cbased heuristic algorithm for addressing the problem of optimal provisioning for VN with unsplittable flow and optimal provisioning for VN with splittable flow problems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the total revenue by conducting extensive simulations on different networks.     

Active mode leakage reduction using fine-grained forward body biasing strategy

Leakage power minimization has become an important issue with technology scaling. Variable threshold voltage schemes have become popular for standby power reduction. In this work we look at another emerging aspect of this potent problem which is leakage power reduction in active mode of operation. In gate level circuits, a large number of gates are not switching in active mode at any given point in time but nevertheless are consuming leakage power. We propose a fine-grained forward body biasing (FBB) scheme for active mode leakage power reduction in gate level circuits without any delay penalty. Our results show that our optimal polynomial time FBB allocation algorithm results in 70.2% reduction in leakage currents. We also present an exact standard-cell placement driven FBB allocation algorithm that effectively reduces the area penalty using the post-placement area slack and results in 56.5%, 62.8% and 66.1% reduction in leakage currents for 0%, 4% and 8% area slack, respectively. Furthermore, we present a heuristic to solve the standard-cell placement driven FBB allocation problem that is computationally efficient and results in leakage within 2% of that from the exact formulation.