*Correspondence: [email protected] Department of Electric engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Ren’ai road 111, Suzhou, People’s Republic of China Abstract A comparative study of the use of bio-inspired optimization technologies including the Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm, the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm, and Quantum-behaved Particle Swarm Optimization (QPSO) in the ...

This paper describes the use of piezoelectric polymers in order to harvest energy from people walking, together with the electronics needed to increase energy transfer and storage efficiency. An electrostatic generator was also included in order to increase energy harvesting. There have been independent solutions in increasing the harvesting efficiency either on the mechanical harvester or on i...

A recently developed technique for dilution of the naturally high protein packing density in isolated grana membranes was applied to study the dependence of the light harvesting efficiency of photosystem (PS) II on macromolecular crowding. Slight dilution of the protein packing from 80% area fraction to the value found in intact grana thylakoids (70%) leads to an improved functionality of PSII ...

Artificial rainwater harvesting system (ARHS) is a new way to increase water supply in semi-arid area, and has developed rapidly recent years in northwestern China. Not only it used in domestic supply, but also in agricultural as supply irrigation. More than 2 million water cellars have been built in Loess Plateau of China. In this paper, based on 5 years’ related experiments, field engineering...

In addition to the four chlorophylls (Chls) involved in primary charge separation, the photosystem II (PSII) reaction center polypeptides, D1 and D2, coordinate a pair of symmetry-related, peripheral accessory Chls. These Chls are axially coordinated by the D1-H118 and D2-H117 residues and are in close association with the proximal Chl antennae proteins, CP43 and CP47. To gain insight into the ...

Cognitive radio (CR) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) have been deemed two promising technologies due to their potential to achieve high spectral efficiency and massive connectivity. This paper studies a multiple-input singleoutput NOMA CR network relying on simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) conceived for supporting a massive population of power limited batte...

The development of implanted devices is essential because of their direct effect on the lives and safety of humanity. This paper presents the current issues and challenges related to all methods used to harvest energy for implantable biomedical devices. The advantages, disadvantages, and future trends of each method are discussed. The concept of harvesting energy from environmental sources and ...

In this contribution we have studied the dynamics of light harvesting of ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) to a surface adsorbed sensitizing dye (SD) N719. By using the picosecond resolved Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) technique we have explored that the excited ZnO NPs resonantly transfer visible optical radiation to the SD N719. The consequence of the energy transfer on the performance of th...

A small conserved open reading frame in the plastid genome, ycf9, encodes a putative membrane protein of 62 amino acids. To determine the function of this reading frame we have constructed a knockout allele for targeted disruption of ycf9. This allele was introduced into the tobacco plastid genome by biolistic transformation to replace the wild-type ycf9 allele. Homoplasmic ycf9 knockout plants...