Propolis is a natural substance collected by honey bees from various plants such as, poplar, palm, pine, conifer secretions, gums, resins, mucilage and leaf buds. It is collected and brought very ...painstakingly by honey bees to be used for sealing cracks and crevices occurring in their hives. Originally, it as an antiseptic meant for preventing bee-hive from microbial infections along with preventing decomposition of intruders. Additionally, propolis has been used in folk medicine for centuries. The biological characteristics of propolis depend upon its chemical composition, plant sources, geographical zone and seasons. More than 300 compounds have been identified in propolis such as, phenolic compounds, aromatic acids, essential oils, waxes and amino acids. Many scientific articles are published every year in different international journals, and several groups of researchers have focused their attention on the chemical compounds and biological activity of propolis.
Automated deployment and run-time management of microservices-based applications in cloud computing environments is relatively well studied with several mature solutions. However, managing such ...applications and tasks in the cloud-to-edge continuum is far from trivial, with no robust, production-level solutions currently available. This paper presents our first attempt to extend an application-level cloud orchestration framework called MiCADO to utilise edge and fog worker nodes. The paper illustrates how MiCADO-Edge can automatically deploy complex sets of interconnected microservices in such multi-layered cloud-to-edge environments. Additionally, it shows how monitoring information can be collected from such services and how complex, user- defined run-time management policies can be enforced on application components running at any layer of the architecture. The implemented solution is demonstrated and evaluated using two realistic case studies from the areas of video processing and secure healthcare data analysis.
The lucrative features of cloud computing such as pay-as-you-go pricing model and dynamic resource provisioning (elasticity) attract clients to host their applications over the cloud to save up-front ...capital expenditure and to reduce the operational cost of the system. However, the efficient management of hired computational resources is a challenging task. Over the last decade, researchers and practitioners made use of various techniques to propose new methods to address cloud elasticity. Amongst many such techniques, control theory emerges as one of the popular methods to implement elasticity. A plethora of research has been undertaken on cloud elasticity including several review papers that summarise various aspects of elasticity. However, the scope of the existing review articles is broad and focused mostly on the high-level view of the overall research works rather than on the specific details of a particular implementation technique. While considering the importance, suitability and abundance of control theoretical approaches, this paper is a step forward towards a stand-alone review of control theoretic aspects of cloud elasticity. This paper provides a detailed taxonomy comprising of relevant attributes defining the following two perspectives, i.e., control-theory as an implementation technique as well as cloud elasticity as a target application domain. We carry out an exhaustive review of the literature by classifying the existing elasticity solutions using the attributes of control theoretic perspective. The summarized results are further presented by clustering them with respect to the type of control solutions, thus helping in comparison of the related control solutions. In last, a discussion summarizing the pros and cons of each type of control solutions are presented. This discussion is followed by the detail description of various open research challenges in the field.
Nb-containing antiferroelectric materials have recently attracted great research interest as energy storage materials for pulsed power capacitors due to their extraordinary energy storage ...performances. In this case, the optimization of the energy storage performance is obtained by a compositional modulation of NaNbO3-Bi(Zn2/3Nb1/3)O3 bulk ceramics. An optimal energy performance can be obtained with a composition of 0.85NaNbO3-0.15Bi(Zn2/3Nb1/3)O3, which is accompanied by a stable charge energy density in temperatures up to 150 °C owing to its relaxor characteristics and excellent cycling stability after 105 cycles. This work further broadens the scope of NaNbO3-based ceramic applications in the area of pulsed power sources.
Millimeter wave (mm-Wave) wireless communication systems require high gain antennas to overcome path loss effects and thereby enhance system coverage. This paper presents the design and analysis of ...an antenna array for high gain performance of future mm-wave 5G communication systems. The proposed antenna is based on planar microstrip technology and fabricated on 0.254 mm thick dielectric substrate (Rogers-5880) having a relative permittivity of 2.2 and loss tangent of 0.0009. The single radiating element used to construct the antenna array is a microstrip patch that has a configuration resembling a two-pronged fork. The single radiator has a realized gain of 7.6 dBi. To achieve the gain required by 5G base stations, a 64-element array antenna design is proposed which has a bore side gain of 21.2 dBi at 37.2 GHz. The 8 × 8, 8 × 16, and 8 × 32 antenna array designs described here were simulated and optimized using CST Microwave Studio, which is a 3D full-wave electromagnetic solver. The overall characteristics of the array in terms of reflection-coefficient and radiation patterns makes the proposed design suitable for mm-Wave 5G and other communication systems.
(1−
x
)0.94Bi
0.5
Na
0.5
TiO
3
– 0.06BaTiO
3
−
x
La
0.33
NbO
3
(
x
= 0, 0.02, 0.04, 0.06, 0.08, 0.10) (BNBT-LN) bulk lead-free relaxor ferroelectric ceramics were synthesized via solid-state ...sintering method. Phase, microstructure and energy storage properties were determined. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) revealed a single perovskite phase for compositions of
x
≤ 0.02, while the second phase of Bi
2
Ti
2
O
7
along with the parent phase for
x
≥ 0.04. Dense microstructure with a decrease in grain size has been achieved via LN doping. The addition of LN decreased the remnant polarization (
P
r
), and coercive field (
E
c
), while increased the difference between the maximum polarization (
P
max
) and remnant polarization (P
r
). The high energy-storage density of 2.96 J/cm
3
and high recoverable energy density of 1.66 J/cm
3
at a breakdown electric field of 214 kV/cm were achieved for the composition of
x
= 0.02 with good temperature stability satisfying the condition of Δε
r
/ε
r200 °C
≤ ± 15% in a working temperature range of 70 °C to 400 °C. Similarly, a less discharge time of < 4 µs achieved in this study for
x
= 0.02. These results demonstrate that this material may be a good candidate material for power pulsed applications.
Honey bee is vital for pollination and ecological services, boosting crops productivity in terms of quality and quantity and production of colony products: wax, royal jelly, bee venom, honey, pollen ...and propolis. Honey bees are most important plant pollinators and almost one third of diet depends on bee’s pollination, worth billions of dollars. Hence the role that honey bees have in environment and their economic importance in food production, their health is of dominant significance. Honey bees can be infected by various pathogens like: viruses, bacteria, fungi, or infested by parasitic mites. At least more than 20 viruses have been identified to infect honey bees worldwide, generally from Dicistroviridae as well as Iflaviridae families, like ABPV (Acute Bee Paralysis Virus), BQCV (Black Queen Cell Virus), KBV (Kashmir Bee Virus), SBV (Sacbrood Virus), CBPV (Chronic bee paralysis virus), SBPV (Slow Bee Paralysis Virus) along with IAPV (Israeli acute paralysis virus), and DWV (Deformed Wing Virus) are prominent and cause infections harmful for honey bee colonies health. This issue about honey bee viruses demonstrates remarkably how diverse this field is, and considerable work has to be done to get a comprehensive interpretation of the bee virology.
A real-time energy management strategy using dynamic pricing mechanism by deploying a fractional order super twisting sliding mode controller (FOSTSMC) is proposed for correspondence between energy ...users and providers. This framework, which controls the energy demand of the smart grid’s users is managed by the pricing signal provided by the FOSTSMC, issued to the smart meters, and adjusts the users’ demand to remove the difference between energy demand and generation. For the implementation purpose, a scenario based in MATLAB/Simulink is constructed where a sample renewable energy–integrated smart microgrid is considered. For the validation of the framework, the results of FOSTSMC are compared with the benchmark PI controller’s response. The results of the benchmark PI controller are firstly compared in step response analysis, which is followed by the comparison in deploying in renewable energy–integrated smart grid scenario with multiple users. The results indicate that the FOSTSMC-based controller strategy outperformed the existing PI controller-based strategy in terms of overshoot, energy balance, and energy price regulation.
The combination of renewable energy sources and prosumer-based smart grid is a sustainable solution to cater to the problem of energy demand management. A pressing need is to develop an efficient ...Energy Management Model (EMM) that integrates renewable energy sources with smart grids. However, the variable scenarios and constraints make this a complex problem. Machine Learning (ML) methods can often model complex and non-linear data better than the statistical models. Therefore, developing an ML algorithm for the EMM is a suitable option as it reduces the complexity of the EMM by developing a single trained model to predict the performance parameters of EMM for multiple scenarios. However, understanding latent correlations and developing trust in highly complex ML models for designing EMM within the stochastic prosumer-based smart grid is still a challenging task. Therefore, this paper integrates ML and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) in the EMM. At the first stage, an optimization model for Prosumer Energy Surplus (PES), Prosumer Energy Cost (PEC), and Grid Revenue (GR) is formulated to calculate base performance parameters (PES, PEC, and GR) for the training of the ML-based GPR model. In the second stage, stochasticity of renewable energy sources, load, and energy price, same as provided by the Genetic Algorithm (GA) based optimization model for PES, PEC, and GR, and base performance parameters act as input covariates to produce a GPR model that predicts PES, PEC, and GR. Seasonal variations of PES, PEC, and GR are incorporated to remove hitches from seasonal dynamics of prosumers energy generation and prosumers energy consumption. The proposed adaptive Service Level Agreement (SLA) between energy prosumers and the grid benefits both these entities. The results of the proposed model are rigorously compared with conventional optimization (GA and PSO) based EMM to prove the validity of the proposed model.
Honey bee venom (BV) is a valuable product, and has a wide range of biological effects, and its use is rapidly increasing in apitherapy. Therefore, the current study, we reviewed the existing ...knowledge about BV composition and its numerous pharmacological properties for future research and use. Honey bee venom or apitoxin is produced in the venom gland in the honey bee abdomen. Adult bees use it as a primary colony defense mechanism. It is composed of many biologically active substances including peptides, enzymes, amines, amino acids, phospholipids, minerals, carbohydrates as well as some volatile components. Melittin and phospholipase A2 are the most important components of BV, having anti-cancer, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, anti-arthritis, anti-nociceptive and other curative potentials. Therefore, in medicine, BV has been used for centuries against different diseases like arthritis, rheumatism, back pain, and various inflammatory infections. Nowadays, BV or its components separately, are used for the treatment of various diseases in different countries as a natural medicine with limited side effects. Consequently, scientists as well as several pharmaceutical companies are trying to get a new understanding about BV, its substances and its activity for more effective use of this natural remedy in modern medicine.
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