1,721,310 research outputs found
Thin Film Solar Cells Current Status & Future Trends
No full textThe need of more and more energy supply due to increased demand from emerging countries such as India, China and Brazil and the contemporary necessity to preserve the environment has increased the interest to the development of new technologies that make use of solar energy. In particular photovoltaic solar energy, the direct conversion of solar energy into electricity by means of semiconducting materials, had a very strong development in the last 30 years. The most important parameter that characterizes a photovoltaic device is the ratio between its conversion efficiency and its cost. A value less than 0.5 /Wp for CdTe/CdS thin film modules fabricated by “First Solar”. In any case, in order to reach the goal of 0.5 $/Wp or less, the only way is that of further developing thin film photovoltaics. In this book, the most recent results concerning thin film solar cells, covering all kinds of relevant materials, are presented by qualified experts in the field. The book is particular important for researchers who are already engaged or intend to start a research in this area. It could be also useful for the industries who want to invest their money in the new thin film photovoltaic technologies
Resilience of Deep Learning Applications: Where We are and Where We Want to Go
No full textDeep Learning (DL) [1] is currently one of the most intensively and widely used predictive models in the field of machine learning. DL has proven to give very good results for many complex tasks and applications, such as object recognition in images/videos, natural language processing, robotics, aerospace, smart healthc are, and autonomous driving. Nowa-days, there is intense activity in designing custom Artificial Intelligence (AI) hardware accelerators to support the energy-hungry data movement, speed of computation, and memory resources that DL requires to realize its full potential [2]. Furthermore, there is an incentive to migrate AI from cloud to edge devices, i.e., Internet-of- Things devices, to address data confidentiality issues and bandwidth limitations, and also to alleviate the communication latency, especially for real-time safety-critical decisions, e.g., in autonomous driving
Polycristalline CdTe Thin Films Solar Cells
No full textWe report the state of the art of the second generation of solar cells, based on CdTe thin film technology. This type of cells reached on laboratory scale, photovoltaic energy conversion efficiencies of about 16.5% higher than those obtained with the bulk materials. In particular, we describe the materials, the layers sequence, the characteristic deposition techniques and the devices that are realized by adopting this semiconductor as absorber material. Particular emphasis will be placed on major innovations that have made possible to achieve high efficiencies with polycrystalline materials by showing how the thin-film technology is mature enough to be easily transferred to industrial production. We will focus our attention on a technological project, completely developed in Italy, with the aim to transfer the CdTe/CdS polycrystalline thin film photovoltaic module process to an industrial production
The Use of Saltwater in Varying the Energy Produced in a Combined Gas-Steam Plant
No full textA new version of a combined gas-steam power plant integrated with a hydraulic turbine and a special type of pumping unit is presented. The simplicity of the plant configuration notably reduces costs, while the use of saltwater and the small head requirement ensure a vast range of technically rational and economic installations
Formal Design Space Exploration for memristor-based crossbar architecture
No full textThe unceasing shrinking process of CMOS technology is leading to its physical limits, impacting several aspects, such as performances, power consumption and many others. Alternative solutions are under investigation in order to overcome CMOS limitations. Among them, the memristor is one of promising technologies. Several works have been proposed so far, describing how to synthesize boolean logic functions on memristors-based crossbar architecture. However, depending on the synthesis parameters, different architectures can be obtained. Design Space Exploration (DSE) is therefore mandatory to help and guide the designer in order to select the best crossbar configuration. In this paper, we present a formal DSE approach. The main advantage is that it does not require any simulation and thus it avoids any runtime overheads. Preliminary results show the huge gain in runtime compared to simulation-based DSE
Flying solo: the determinants of individual Business Angels investment decisions against the BAN selection
No full textReliability assessment of FreeRTOS in Embedded Systems
Full text linkhis work studies the reliability of a FreeRTOS operating system when affected by Single Event Upset faults. The methodology is based on fault injection to target the most relevant variables and data structures. Results confirm the selectivity in the OS fault tolerance, paving the way to a tailored design of fault-tolerant mechanisms, such as selective hardening of the OS
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