Real-Time Cooling Power Attribution for Co-Located Data Center Rooms with Distinct Temperatures and Humidities

At present, a co-location data center often applies an identical and low temperature setpoint for its all server rooms. Although increasing the temperature setpoint is a rule-of-thumb approach to reducing the cooling energy usage, the tenants may have different mentalities and technical constraints in accepting higher temperature setpoints. Thus, supporting distinct temperature setpoints is desirable for a co-location data center in pursuing higher energy efficiency. This calls for a new cooling power attribution scheme to address the inter-room heat transfers that can be up to 9% of server load as shown in our real experiments. This article describes our approaches to estimating the inter-room heat transfers, using the estimates to rectify the metered power usages of the rooms’ air handling units, and fairly attributing the power usage of the shared cooling infrastructure (i.e., chiller and cooling tower) to server rooms by following the Shapley value principle. Extensive numeric experiments based on a widely accepted cooling system model are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed cooling power attribution scheme. A case study suggests that the proposed scheme incentivizes rational tenants to adopt their highest acceptable temperature setpoints under a non-cooperative game setting. Further analysis considering distinct relative humidity setpoints shows that our proposed scheme also properly and inherently addresses the attribution of humidity control power.

Impact of Sowing Time on Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) Biomass Accumulation and Yield

Chickpea growth, development and grain yield are affected by a range of climatic and environmental factors. Experiments were conducted across four sowing dates from mid-April to the end of May, over two years at Trangie in central western New South Wales (NSW), and Leeton, Wagga Wagga and Yanco (one year) in southern NSW, to examine the influence of sowing time on biomass accumulation, grain yield and plant yield components. Climatic and experimental location data were recorded during the growing seasons. Early sowing (mid-April) resulted in taller plants, higher bottom and top pod heights, fewer pods, more unfilled pods and greater biomass accumulation, but low harvest index due to reduced grain yield compared with late sowing (end of May). Grain number was positively correlated with grain yield and was the main yield component accounting for most of the variation in yield. There was largely a positive correlation between biomass and yield, especially with delayed sowing except for Leeton experiments. This study concludes that sowing around the end of April in central western NSW and mid-May in southern NSW is conducive to higher grain yield as it minimises exposure to abiotic stresses at critical growth periods and allows efficient conversion of biomass to grain yield.

Understanding NO2 Concentration Dynamics within Tema Metropolitan Area of Ghana Using Generalized Linear Model

The concentration of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is worsening across the globe alongside growth in industrial and general anthropogenic activities. Due to its serious health implications with long-term exposure, studies on NO2 concentration have gained space in the academic literature. In this study, awareness is created on the levels of NO2 across four (4) locations within the Tema Metropolitan area, with specific interest in selecting locations and periods significantly saturated with NO2 within the study area. NO2 was measured using RKI Eagle, an instrument with a built-in sensor for a specific gas measurement. Measurements were taken day and night at sampling points around 100 meters apart in each location. Data collection was performed over a nine (9)-month period. The Generalized Linear model is explored for selecting locations and periods significantly affected by NO2. From the results, the fourth week (26th–31st) of July 2020, the fourth week (27th–31st) of December 2020, the first week (1st–7th) of January 2021, and the fourth week (24th–31st) of January 2021 recorded severe concentrations of NO2. Additionally, the lives of residents in the Oil Jetty and the VALVO hospital areas were found to be the most endangered, as they recorded significantly high concentrations of NO2. In a developing country such as Ghana, this study is useful for monitoring NO2 concentrations in similar areas to inform decision making and environmental policy formulation.

Optimal Sizing of Stand-Alone Microgrids Based on Recent Metaheuristic Algorithms

Scientists have been paying more attention to the shortage of water and energy sources all over the world, especially in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In this article, a microgrid configuration of a photovoltaic (PV) plant with fuel cell (FC) and battery storage systems has been optimally designed. A real case study in Egypt in Dobaa region of supplying safety loads at a nuclear power plant during emergency cases is considered, where the load characteristics and the location data have been taken into consideration. Recently, many optimization algorithms have been developed by researchers, and these algorithms differ from one another in their performance and effectiveness. On the other hand, there are recent optimization algorithms that were not used to solve the problem of microgrids design in order to evaluate their performance and effectiveness. Optimization algorithms of equilibrium optimizer (EQ), bat optimization (BAT), and black-hole-based optimization (BHB) algorithms have been applied and compared in this paper. The optimization algorithms are individually used to optimize and size the energy systems to minimize the cost. The energy systems have been modeled and evaluated using MATLAB.

Location-Based Internationalization and Localization With Mobile Computing

The Android system operates on many smartphones in many locales. Websites and web tools have their own requirements in day-to-day life. To reach the maximum users, the app and website should handle all the resources such as text strings, functions, layouts, graphics, and any other static data that the app/website needs. It requires internationalization and localization of the website and app to support multiple languages. The basic idea of this chapter is to present an approach for localizing the Android application according to the location data that the app received from the device, but many users do not allow the “access location” feature so this approach will be a dead end in this case. The authors have proposed some other techniques to achieve this feature of localization and internationalization by implementing the “choose language” service so that the app can itself optimize its content and translate it into the user's native language.