Efficient use of assets in agriculture is a goal for policy-makers and farmers. Agricultural input resources are scarce therefore optimum use of inputs in different agricultural operations is important. Mathematical programming technique such as data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a well-known approach for estimation efficiency of agricultural DMUs. In this study, efficiency of kidney bean produ...

The remarkable performance and quantum efficiency of biological light-harvesting complexes has prompted a multidisciplinary interest in engineering biologically inspired antenna systems as a possible route to novel solar cell technologies. Key to the effectiveness of biological "nanomachines" in light capture and energy transport is their highly ordered nanoscale architecture of photoactive mol...

The nature of the highly efficient energy transfer in photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes is a subject of intense research. Unfortunately, the low fluorescence efficiency and limited photostability hampers the study of individual light-harvesting complexes at ambient conditions. Here we demonstrate an over 500-fold fluorescence enhancement of light-harvesting complex 2 (LH2) at the single...

In this paper, we propose a hybrid polling Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol with Human Energy Harvesting capabilities, called HEH-BMAC, designed for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The proposed protocol uses a dynamic schedule algorithm to combine User Identification polling (ID) and Probabilistic Contention (PC) random access, adapting the network operation to the random, time-varying...

[1] Indian megacities face severe water supply problems owing to factors ranging from growing population to high municipal pipe leakage rates; no Indian city provides 24/7 water supply. Current approaches to addressing the problem have been “utility centric,” overlooking the significance of decentralized activities by consumers, groundwater extraction via private wells, and aquifer recharge by ...

In natural light-harvesting systems, pigment-protein complexes (PPC) convert sunlight to chemical energywith near unity quantum efficiency. PPCs exhibit emergent properties that cannot be simply extrapolated from knowledge of their component parts. In this Perspective, we examine the design principles of PPCs, focussing on the major light-harvesting complex of Photosystem II (LHCII), the most a...

Vibration energy harvesting with piezoelectric materials currently generate up to 300 microwatts per cm2, using it to be mooted as an appropriate method of energy harvesting for powering low-power electronics. One of the important problems in bimorph piezoelectric energy harvesting is the generation of the highest power with the lowest weight. In this paper the effect of the shape and geometry ...

The Wireless sensor networks have been deployed in an wide range of applications in environmental monitoring, target tracking, etc. The sensor networks have an major problem concerned with energy efficiency and lifetime of the network. The Energy consumed by the nodes should be less which prevents the earlier death of sensor nodes due to drained energy level. Several techniques have been used t...

There exists a wealth of means of efficient utilization of solar energy in nature, with photosynthesis of chlorophylls as a prime example. Separately, artificially structured plasmonic materials are versatile in light harvesting and energy conversion. Using a simple and scalable design of near-percolating silver nanostructures, we demonstrate that the light-harvesting efficiency of chlorophylls...

A boost converter for thermoelectric energy harvesting in 130 nm CMOS achieves energy harvesting from a 10 mV input, which allows wearable body sensors to continue operation with low thermal gradients. The design uses a peak inductor current control scheme and duty cycled, offset compensated comparators to maintain high efficiency across a broad range of input and output voltages. The measured ...