Saqer Saleh Alja'Afreh

Renewable energy sources (RESs) are increasingly being recognized as sustainable and accessible alternatives for the energy future. However, their intermittent nature poses significant challenges to system reliability and stability, necessitating the integration of energy storage systems (ESSs) to ensure sustainability and dependability. This study examines various ESS alternatives, evaluating their suitability for different applications using a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. The methodology accommodates diverse criteria types, including qualitative and quantitative factors, represented as linguistic terms, interval values, and crisp numerical data. A techno-socio-economic framework for ESS selection is proposed and applied to Jordan’s unique energy landscape. This framework integrates technical performance, economic feasibility, and social considerations to identify suitable ESS solutions aligned with the country’s renewable energy goals. The study ranks twelve energy storage systems (ESSs) based on key performance criteria. Pumped hydro storage (PHS), thermal energy storage (TES), supercapacitors (SCs), and lithium-ion batteries (Li-ion BESS) lead the ranking. These systems showed the best performance in terms of scalability, efficiency, and integration with grid-scale applications in Jordan. Key applications analyzed include renewable energy integration, grid stability, load shifting, peak load regulation, frequency regulation, and seasonal energy storage. Results indicate that Li-ion batteries are most suitable for renewable energy integration, while flywheels excel in grid stability and frequency regulation. PHS was found to be the preferred solution for load shifting, peak load regulation, and seasonal storage, with hydrogen storage emerging as a promising option for long-duration needs. These findings provide critical insights to guide policy and infrastructure planning, offering a robust model for comprehensive ESS assessment in energy transition planning for countries facing similar challenges.

Underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) is a recent advancement in optical wireless communication (OWC) that offers a higher capacity and bandwidth for underwater applications than traditional acoustic systems. However, UOWC links are vulnerable to the complex influences of aquatic environmental conditions involving concentrations of contaminant factors and sources of noise that degrade their performance, thus complicating their design and practical implementation. To compensate for the deterioration caused by these issues, techniques such as low-density parity-check (LDPC) coding have been proposed to enhance error correction and system performance. Therefore, in this study, we evaluate the performance of LDPC-coded line-of-sight UOWC channels under different aquatic environmental impacts, noise factors, and optical property parameters. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), bit error rate (BER), and Q-factor were among the most important metrics studied via simulations using OptiSystem v.21 and MATLAB. The results show that for a 6G-UOWC system operating at 60 GHz and 10 Gbps, the maximum transmission distances are 25 m in pure water and 1.96 m in harbor water at a depth of 7 m. Solar noise reduces these distances, whereas LDPC coding significantly improves performance by extending the maximum distance to 29 m in clear water. Moreover, a comparative analysis of different field-of-view (FOV) settings revealed that a lower FOV reduces the impact of solar noise across depths. In addition, the maximum achievable data rate with LDPC coding reached 18 Gbps, with distances varying from 21 m under optimal conditions to 1.65 m under less favorable conditions.

This paper presents a thorough review of the main techniques used for wireless power transfer (WPT) in implantable medical devices (IMDs) with a specific focus on the techniques that employ implantable antennas for energy harvesting (electromagnetic (EM) WPT techniques). The techniques are first analysed and compared based on the IMD application, power transfer efficiency (PTE), transfer distance, implantation depth, implant size, operating frequency, and specific absorption rate (SAR). The study provides a critical analysis of the main WPT system’s as well as implantable antennas’ design parameters that control the PTE and hence the charging rate of the IMD. The investigated design parameters include the WPT TX-RX antennas’ gain, WPT-RX size, transfer distance, and the WPT TX-RX antennas’ alignment. Tutorial simulation examples are included to showcase the impact of these design parameters on the amount of power coupled to the IMD. The paper also discusses recent techniques used for improving the amount of power received by implantable antennas, and hence higher PTE and IMDs charging rate, namely, the use of implantable MIMO WPT-RX antennas to mitigate antennas misalignment and the use of metamaterial surfaces to focus the power emitted from WPT-TX antennas towards the implantable WPT-RX antennas. The findings and observations reported in this study serve as a valuable resource for designers and researchers to comprehend the effect of various WPT TX-RX antennas design parameters on PTE. The analysis and full-wave simulation examples, included in the paper, are shown very useful in understanding the challenges associated with WPT in IMDs and in proposing potential solutions.

Deep neural network models have become powerful tools of machine learning and artificial intelligence. They can approximate functions and dynamics by learning from examples. This paper reviews the state-of-art of deep learning-based object detection frameworks that are used for fruit detection in general and for olive fruit in particular. A dataset of olive fruit on the tree is built to train and evaluate deep models. The ultimate goal of this work is the capability of on-edge real-time olive fruit detection on the tree from digital videos. Recent work in deep neural networks has led to the development of a state-of-the-art object detector termed You Only Look Once version five (YOLOv5). This paper builds a dataset of 1.2 K source images of olive fruit on the tree and evaluates the latest object detection algorithms focusing on variants of YOLOv5 and YOLOR. The results of the YOLOv5 models show that the YOLOv5 new network models are able to extract rich olive features from images and detect the olive fruit with a high precision of higher than 0.75 mAP_0.5. YOLOv5s performs better for real-time olive fruit detection on the tree over other YOLOv5 variants and YOLOR.

This work presents the design and analysis of newly developed reconfigurable, flexible, inexpensive, optically-controlled, and fully printable chipless Arabic alphabet-based radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. The etching of the metallic copper tag strip is performed on a flexible simple thin paper substrate (ϵ_r = 2.31) backed by a metallic ground plane. The analysis of investigated tags is performed in CST MWS in the frequency range of 1–12 GHz for the determination of the unique signature resonance characteristics of each tag in terms of its back-scattered horizontal and vertical mono-static radar cross section (RCS). The analysis reflects that each tag has its own unique electromagnetic signature (EMS) due to the changing current distribution of metallic resonator. This EMS of each tag could be used for the robust detection and recognition of all realized 28 Arabic alphabet tags. The study also discusses, for the first time, the effect of the change in font type and size of realized tags on their EMS. The robustness and reliability of the obtained EMS of letter tags is confirmed by comparing the RCS results for selective letter tags using FDTD and MoM numerical methods, which shows very good agreement. The proposed tags could be used for smart internet of things (IoT) and product marketing applications.

A self-isolated 10-element antenna array operating in the long-term evolution 42 (LTE42) frequency band is proposed for 5G massive MIMO smartphone applications. The proposed antenna elements are placed in a 2D array configuration; they are placed symmetrically along the two long edges of the mobile chassis. The proposed antenna structure is a shorted loop antenna resonating at half-wavelength mode, which is rarely deployed by researchers due to its large size compared to other quarter wavelength antenna structures. It is a printed, shorted, and compact loop antenna of a total footprint area of 6 × 6.5 mm ² (λ/14.3 ×λ/13.2, where λ is the free space wavelength at 3.5 GHz). A small capacitive coupling flag-shaped strip is used to excite the proposed loop antenna. The compactness is achieved using an inward meandering that forms an internal loop in the element. The position and the dimensions of this loop are used to tune the resonant frequency and matching level at 3.5 GHz. The results (theoretical, simulated, and measured) show that the 3.5 GHz band (3.4-3.6 GHz) is achieved with impedance matching better than -10 dB, and total efficiency higher than 65%. A 10 × 10 MIMO system is formed and it has an excellent MIMO and diversity performance in-terms of the envelope correlation coefficient (below 0.055), and apparently it has the highest channel capacity (about 54.3 bps/Hz) among other MIMO systems of the same order. Simulation results of the specific absorption rate (SAR) demonstrates that the proposed antenna solution satisfied SAR criterion. Thus, the proposed ten-element MIMO antenna represent an excellent candidate for sub-6 GHz 5G smartphone applications.