ABSTRACT
Many students all over the world have faced some educational issues due to the Covid-19 epidemic. As a consequence, many educational institutes focused on shifting to an E-learning system. This paper introduces a design and implementation steps of a remotely controlled experiment representing a smart hydro energy storage and irrigation system with monitoring capability using photovoltaic power and the Internet of Things (IoT). The experiment is running within the newly proposed Laboratory Learning Management System (LLMS). The remotely controlled experiment is a smart hydro energy storage and irrigation system, where the stored water during the daytime is used at night for smart irrigation of three different types of plants based on the moisture and temperature, in addition to the amount of water that the user sets for every area. In this experiment, during the daytime, the utilities are feeding from the solar panel and battery, but at night, the utilities are feeding from the battery or the hydro turbine that converts the water potential energy to electric energy. The overall Experiment is controlled using IoT sensors and relays which are connected and driven by the parameters that the user sets and can be communicated with the system using the Internet which allows the system to be proactive and take the needed decision in the right time. The main contribution of this system's experiment is the pumping of underground water in irrigation using a renewable and clean energy source, in addition to controlling the systems using IoT through the proposed LLMS. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
During the current crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Wearable IoT (WIoT) health devices have become essential resources for remote monitoring of the main physiological signs affected by this disease. As well as sensors, microprocessor, and wireless communication elements are widely studied, the power supply unit has the same importance for the WIoT technology, since the autonomy of the system between recharges is of great importance. This letter presents the design of the power supply system of a WIoT device capable of monitoring oxygen saturation and body temperature, sending the collected data to an IoT platform. The supply system is based on a three-stage block consisting of a rechargeable battery, battery charge controller, and dc voltage converter. The power supply system is designed and implemented as a prototype in order to test performance and efficiency. The results show that the designed block provides a stable supply voltage avoiding energy losses, which makes it an efficient and rapidly developing system.
ABSTRACT
Over the last three COVID-19 effective years, it was evident that healthcare has been the most sensitive sector to electricity failures. Therefore, if well developed and implemented, a microgrid system with an integrated energy storage system (ESS) installed in hospitals has great potential to provide an uninterrupted and low-energy cost solution. In this article, we target to show the importance of the installed ESS against the problems that will arise from power outages and energy quality problems in hospitals. Besides, it aims to construct an energy management system (EMS) based on the scheduling model to meet the lowest cost of a system containing solar panels, microturbine, gas boiler, and energy storage units that are repurposed lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles and thermal storage tank. EMS is a mixed-integer linear program to meet the hospital's electricity, heating, and cooling demands with the lowest cost for every hour. The established scheduling model is run for a hospital in Antioch, Turkiye, with 197 beds, 4 operating rooms, 2 resuscitation units, and 9 intensive care units for every hour based on the data in 2019. With the EMS, approximately 25% savings were achieved compared to the previous energy cost. Furthermore, as the result of the net present value calculation, the payback period of the proposed system is estimated to be approximately seven years.
ABSTRACT
The massive discard of spent masks during the COVID-19 pandemic imposes great environmental anxiety to the human society, which calls for a reliable and sustainable outlet to mitigate this issue. In this work, we demonstrate a green design strategy of recycling the spent masks to fabricate hard carbon fabrics toward high-efficient sodium energy storage. After a simple carbonization treatment, flexible hard carbon fabrics composed of interwoven microtubular fibers are obtained. When serving as binder-free anodes of sodium-ion batteries, a large Na-ion storage capacity of 280 mAh g-1 is achieved for the optimized sample. More impressively, the flexible anode exhibits an initial coulombic efficiency of as high as 86% and excellent rate/cycling performance. The real-life practice of the flexible hard carbon is realized in the full-cells. The present study affords an enlightening approach for the recycling fabrication of high value-added hard carbon materials from the spent masks for advanced sodium energy storage.
ABSTRACT
During the covid pandemic, air quality has improved due to prolonged lockdown conditions. Hence according to the international energy agency, about 22% of environmental pollution is contributed by the transportation sector. Electric vehicles help in reducing the contribution towards carbon emission and help in mitigating the fossil fuel crisis and also promotes sustainable transportation. To enhance the growth of electric vehicle, charging infrastructure and range anxiety issues in the long drive has to be resolved. This paper reviews the various charging methods available for an electric vehicle. Some charging methods are wired and wireless charging, solar-powered, battery-swapping, vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-vehicle charging. A comparative study of these methods is tabulated. Based on the limitation of each method the optimum charging method for a vehicle is adapted for a particular application. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The global pandemic of COVID-19 poses significant challenge to the recycling of disposable polypropylene (PP)-based waste masks. Herein, a simple but effective sulfonation route has been proposed to transform PP-based waste masks into value-added hard carbon (CM) anode materials for advanced sodium-ion batteries. The sulfonation treatment improves the thermal stability of the PP molecule, preventing their complete decomposition and the release of massive gas molecules during the carbonization process. Meanwhile, the oxygen functional groups introduced during sulfonation effectively facilitates the cross-linking between the PP chains, hindering the rearrangement of carbon microcrystalline structures and enhancing its structural disorder. As a result, the prepared hard carbon anode (CM-180) with a high disorder degree and minimal surface defects realizes a high sodium storage capacity of 327.4 mAh g−1 with excellent cycle and rate capability. In addition, when coupled with O3–NaNi1/3Fe1/3Mn1/3O2 cathode, the fabricated sodium-ion full cell delivers a high energy density of 238 Wh kg−1 and achieves an outstanding rate capability with a retained capacity of 75 mAh g−1 even at an ultrahigh current rate of 50 C. This work offers a novel insight into transforming the waste masks to value-added hard carbons with promising prospects for sodium-ion batteries. © 2023
ABSTRACT
The world has now looked towards installing more renewable energy sources type distributed generation (DG), such as solar photovoltaic DG (SPVDG), because of its advantages to the environment and the quality of power supply it produces. However, these sources' optimal placement and size are determined before their accommodation in the power distribution system (PDS). This is to avoid an increase in power loss and deviations in the voltage profile. Furthermore, in this article, solar PV is integrated with battery energy storage systems (BESS) to compensate for the shortcomings of SPVDG as well as the reduction in peak demand. This paper presented a novel coronavirus herd immunity optimizer algorithm for the optimal accommodation of SPVDG with BESS in the PDS. The proposed algorithm is centered on the herd immunity approach to combat the COVID-19 virus. The problem formulation is focused on the optimal accommodation of SPVDG and BESS to reduce the power loss and enhance the voltage profile of the PDS. Moreover, voltage limits, maximum current limits, and BESS charge-discharge constraints are validated during the optimization. Moreover, the hourly variation of SPVDG generation and load profile with seasonal impact is examined in this study. IEEE 33 and 69 bus PDSs are tested for the development of the presented work. The suggested algorithm showed its effectiveness and accuracy compared to different optimization techniques. © 2023 TÜBÍTAK.
ABSTRACT
Drones operate on electric batteries and not on gasoline, so the eco-friendly role of drones has recently attracted a lot of attention. Thus, this study was designed in order to investigate differences in behavioral intentions, such as intention to use, word-of-mouth, and willingness to pay more, according to demographic characteristics and past experiences in the field of eco-friendly drone food delivery services. Data were collected from 422 potential consumers of eco-friendly drone food delivery services in South Korea. The data analysis results indicated that females are more willing to pay extra than males are, respondents who were in their 50s had higher word-of-mouth intention than other generations, marital status showed significant differences in willingness to pay more and intentions to use, and there was a difference in willingness to pay more and word-of-mouth with regards to monthly income. In addition, respondents who had previously heard of drone food delivery services had higher averages with willingness to pay more and intentions to use as opposed to respondents who had not heard of them, and respondents who had experience controlling drones were willing to pay additional fees when they used eco-friendly drone food delivery services. The results of this study would be a great assistance for executives who will operate eco-friendly drone food delivery services.
ABSTRACT
Transportation sector is the important sector and consumed the most fossil fuel in the world. Since COVID-19 started in 2019, this sector had become the world connector because every country relies on logistics. The transportation sector does not only deal with the human transportation but also relates to logistics. Research in every country has searched for alternative transportation to replace internal combustion engines using fossil fuel, one of the most prominent choices is fuel cells. Fuel cells can use hydrogen as fuel. Hydrogen can be fed to the fuel cells to provide electric power to drive vehicles, no greenhouse gas emission and no direct combustion required. The fuel cells have been developed widely as the 21st century energy-conservation devices for mobile, stationary, and especially vehicles. The fuel cell electric vehicles using hydrogen as fuel were also called hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or hydrogen electric vehicles. The fuel cells were misconceived by several people that they were batteries, but the fuel cells could provide electric power continuously if their fuel was provided continuously. The batteries could provide electric power as their only capacities, when all ions are released, no power could be provided. Because the fuel cell vehicles play important roles for our future transportation, the overall review for these vehicles is significantly interesting. This overall review can provide general and technical information, variety of readers;vehicle users, manufacturers, and scientists, can perceive and understand the fuel cell vehicles within this review. The readers can realize how important the fuel cell technologies are and support research around the world to drive the fuel cell vehicles to be the leading vehicles in our sustainable developing world. [Display omitted] • Fuel cells use hydrogen as fuel to provide electric power. • Fuel cells do not emit greenhouse gas and do not require direct combustion. • The fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) are one of the zero emission vehicles. • Fuel cell technology has been developed for many types of vehicles. • Hydrogen production, transportation, storage and usage links play roles on FCEVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Hydrogen Energy is the property of Pergamon Press - An Imprint of Elsevier Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
ABSTRACT
The recent trend of transitioning from cars with internal combustion engines to green cars has accelerated amidst growing concerns of a climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. South Korea is a particularly good test bed for exploring green mobility alternatives and setting priorities for green car policies, owing to its fast-growing green car market and its considerable share in the worldwide purchases of fuel cell electric vehicles. Accordingly, this study explores the Korean conceptualization of green cars and the prioritization of different aspects of future green car policy using qualitative Q methodology and additional interviews. A total of 31 transport policy experts participated in our survey, resulting in three distinct perspectives: a hybrid vehicle supporter with comparative pragmatism, an electric vehicle supporter from multiple aspects, and a radical ecologist searching for new alternatives. Based on these expert insights, we determine the most appropriate green car type and provide important recommendations for future green car policy. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19—related lockdowns (2020–2022), mobility patterns and charging needs were substantially affected. Policies such as work from home, lockdowns, and curfews reduced traffic and commuting significantly. This global pandemic may have also substantially changed mobility patterns on the long term and therefore the need for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. This paper analyzes changes in electric charging in the Netherlands for different user groups during different phases of the COVID-19 lockdown to assess the effects on EV charging needs. Charging needs dropped significantly during this period, which also changed the distribution of the load on the electricity grid throughout the day. Curfews affected the start times of charging sessions during peak hours of grid consumption. Infrastructure dedicated to commuters was used less intensively, and the charging needs of professional taxi drivers were drastically reduced during lockdown periods. These trends were partially observed during a post–lockdown measuring period of roughly 8 months, indicating a longer shift in mobility and charging patterns. © 2023 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
With the prevalence of COVID-19, wearing medical surgical masks has become a requisite measure to protect against the invasion of the virus. Therefore, a huge amount of discarded medical surgical masks will be produced, which will become a potential hazard to pollute the environment and endanger the health of organisms without our awareness. Herein, a green and cost-effective way for the reasonable disposal of waste masks becomes necessary. In this work, we realized the transformation from waste medical surgical masks into high-quality carbon-nickel composite nanowires, which not only benefit the protection of the environment and ecosystem but also contribute to the realization of economic value. The obtained composite carbon-based materials demonstrate 70 S m-1conductivity, 5.2 nm average pore diameters, 234 m2g-1surface areas, and proper graphitization degree. As an anode material for lithium-ion batteries, the prepared carbon composite materials demonstrate a specific capacity of 420 mA h g-1after 800 cycles at a current density of 0.2 A g-1. It also displays good rate performance and decent cycling stability. Therefore, this study provides an approach to converting the discarded medical surgical masks into high-quality carbon nanowire anode materials to turn waste into treasure. © 2023 American Chemical Society. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Climate neutrality is becoming a core long-term competitiveness asset within the aviation industry, as demonstrated by the several innovations and targets set within that sector, prior to and especially after the COVID-19 crisis. Ambitious timelines are set, involving important investment decisions to be taken in a 5-years horizon time. Here, we provide an in-depth review of alternative technologies for sustainable aviation revealed to date, which we classified into four main categories, namely i) biofuels, ii) electrofuels, iii) electric (battery-based), and iv) hydrogen aviation. Nine biofuel and nine electrofuel pathways were reviewed, for which we supply the detailed process flow picturing all input, output, and co-products generated. The market uptake and use of these co-products was also investigated, along with the overall international regulations and targets for future aviation. As most of the inventoried pathways require hydrogen, we further reviewed six existing and emerging carbon-free hydrogen production technologies. Our review also details the five key battery technologies available (lithium-ion, advanced lithium-ion, solid-state battery, lithium-sulfur, lithium-air) for aviation. A semi-quantitative ranking covering environmental-, economic-, and technological performance indicators has been established to guide the selection of promising routes. The possible configuration schemes for electric propulsion systems are documented and classified as: i) battery-based, ii) fuel cell-based and iii) turboelectric configurations. Our review studied these four categories of sustainable aviation systems as modular technologies, yet these still have to be used in a hybridized fashion with conventional fossil-based kerosene. This is among others due to an aromatics content below the standardized requirements for biofuels and electrofuels, to a too low energy storage capacity in the case of batteries, or a sub-optimal gas turbine engine in the case of cryogenic hydrogen. Yet, we found that the latter was the only available option, based on the current and emerging technologies reviewed, for long-range aviation completely decoupled of fossil-based hydrocarbon fuels. The various challenges and opportunities associated with all these technologies are summarized in this study.
ABSTRACT
Transportation sector is the important sector and consumed the most fossil fuel in the world. Since COVID-19 started in 2019, this sector had become the world connector because every country relies on logistics. The transportation sector does not only deal with the human transportation but also relates to logistics. Research in every country has searched for alternative transportation to replace internal combustion engines using fossil fuel, one of the most prominent choices is fuel cells. Fuel cells can use hydrogen as fuel. Hydrogen can be fed to the fuel cells to provide electric power to drive vehicles, no greenhouse gas emission and no direct combustion required. The fuel cells have been developed widely as the 21st century energy-conservation devices for mobile, stationary, and especially vehicles. The fuel cell electric vehicles using hydrogen as fuel were also called hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or hydrogen electric vehicles. The fuel cells were misconceived by several people that they were batteries, but the fuel cells could provide electric power continuously if their fuel was provided continuously. The batteries could provide electric power as their only capacities, when all ions are released, no power could be provided. Because the fuel cell vehicles play important roles for our future transportation, the overall review for these vehicles is significantly interesting. This overall review can provide general and technical information, variety of readers;vehicle users, manufacturers, and scientists, can perceive and understand the fuel cell vehicles within this review. The readers can realize how important the fuel cell technologies are and support research around the world to drive the fuel cell vehicles to be the leading vehicles in our sustainable developing world. © 2022 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC
ABSTRACT
In recent years, some phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic have caused the autonomous vehicle (AV) to attract much attention in theoretical and applied research. This paper addresses the optimization problem of a heterogeneous fleet that consists of autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) and conventional vehicles (CVs) in a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) distribution system. The absence of the driver in AEVs results in the necessity of studying two factors in modeling the problem, namely time windows in the routing plan and different compartments in the loading space of AEVs. The arrival and departure times of the AEV at the customer’s location must be pre-planned, because, the AEV is not able to decide what to do if the customer is late at this point. Also, due to increasing the security of the loads inside the AEVs and the lack of control of the driver during the delivery of the goods, each customer should only have access to his/her orders. Therefore, the compartmentation of the AEV’s loading area has been proposed in its conceptual model. We developed a mathematical model based on these properties and proposed a hybrid algorithm, including variable neighborhood search (VNS) via neighborhood structure of large neighborhood search (LNS), namely the VLNS algorithm. The numerical results shed light on the proficiency of the algorithm in terms of solution time and solution quality. In addition, employing AEVs in the mixed fleet is considered to be desirable based on the operational cost of the fleet. Author
ABSTRACT
The global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the electric vehicle (EV) industry. The lockdown restriction has resulted in a significant shift in the use of public charging infrastructures. This paper investigates the effects of COVID-19 on electric vehicle users' charging behavior before, after, and during COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, using the data from a public charging facility from the City of California. In this study, we performed data visualization using K-means and hierarchical clustering analysis. This work uses the vehicle's connection and disconnection time to identify common charging pattern identification and charging behavior where K-means clustering outperforms the hierarchical clustering for all three different scenarios modelled. In addition, prediction of collective charging session duration is achieved using Machine Learning Models, Random Forest and XgBoost. We achieved a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.146 and 0.151 percent for XgBoost and Random Forest respectively. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
New energy vehicles are one of the most important strategic emerging industries in China. Lithium battery is the universal choice of energy supply for new energy vehicles at present, which has the advantage of security and stability compared with other new energy sources. China has a complete lithium battery industry chain from lithium mining to battery manufacturing. The CATL is one of the large enterprises of this chain. However, with the rise of domestic competitors, foreign enterprises such as LG Chem have entered the Chinese market strongly. The intensification of market competition and the possible adjustment of national policies make the development of CATL facing many challenges. As early as before the COVID-19, the profits of CATL had declined, and the research on the strategic development of CATL has important practical significance. This paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages, opportunities and threats faced by the power battery business of CATL through the SWOT analysis model. Based on the analysis of the development strategic direction corresponding to the combination of the four elements of the internal and external environment in the model, it is concluded that under the background of the emerging new energy vehicle industry and the gradual improvement of the market, CATL should seek diversified development strategic direction (ST strategy). [ FROM AUTHOR]
ABSTRACT
The outbreak of COVID-19 has greatly changed everyone's lifestyle all over the world. One of the best ways to prevent the spread of infections is by washing hands properly. Although a number of hand hygiene monitoring systems have been proposed, they either cannot achieve high accuracy in practice or work only in limited environments such as hospitals. Therefore, a ubiquitous, energy-efficient and highly accurate hand hygiene monitoring system is still lacking. In this paper, we present WashRing—the first smart ring-based handwashing monitoring system. In WashRing, we design a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) based adaptive sampling approach to achieve high energy efficiency. Then, we design an automatic feature extraction scheme based on wavelet scattering and a CNN-LSTM neural network to achieve fine-grained gesture recognition. Finally, we model the handwashing gesture classification as a few-shot learning problem to mitigate the burden of collecting extensive data from five fingers. We collect data from 25 subjects over 2 months and evaluate the system performance on both commercial OURA ring and customized ring. Evaluation results show that WashRing achieves 97.8%accuracy which is 10.2%–15.9%higher than state-of-the-arts. Our adaptive sampling approach reduces energy consumption by 64.2%compared to fixed duty cycle sampling strategies. IEEE
ABSTRACT
Digital Contact tracing with smartphone apps may help control the spread of serious pathogens, such as COVID-19. Such apps typically use peer-to-peer Bluetooth data transfer to record a contact. However, they suffer from low adoption rates, high false alarm contact indications, battery drain, and user privacy concerns. This paper proposes BECT or BEacon-based Contact Tracing, a contact tracing framework using static Bluetooth beacon devices installed in public or private places that periodically broadcast packets to nearby users that are stored as coins. Users that are positively diagnosed submit their coin IDs to a third-party service (e.g., local health authority) which can mark these coins as infected and disseminate them to other users. A match between a user's stored coins and an infected coin implies that the user has come in direct or indirect contact with an infected person. The BECT framework does not expose users' private data and conserves the device battery. We use MATLAB simulations to compare the performance of the BECT framework to phone-phone apps in a restaurant scenario and show that BECT has superior contact tracing performance. We also provide general deployment guidelines. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a vibration monitoring system for electrical appliances. This system is based on RFID sensors and edge processing technologies. For long-term monitoring, two different operation modes referred to as standby and active modes are introduced. The difference between the two modes is radio wave radiation times. The standby mode is useful to reduce energy consumption and temperature increase of an RFID reader, and amount of data uploaded to a network. This mode also detects a beginning of a vibration event caused by the motor of an electrical appliance. The standby mode subsequently triggers the active mode. The active mode accurately monitors the vibration event and keeps the measured data only for the active mode. Experiments for monitoring a refrigerator demonstrate that the proposed modes enable efficient vibration detections. This system can prevent unintended COVID-19 vaccine disposals caused by the problematic operation and management of refrigerators. © 2022 IEEE.