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In this paper, the results of a geometric investigation of plasmonic nanoantennas for energy harvesting applications in terms of field enhancement and available power are presented. Optimum performances are obtained by a particular arrow-shaped bowtie nanoantennas geometry. The novel nanoantenna geometry is here presented. The simulations of the novel nanoantennas made of aluminium, on a three-layers substrate, composed by silicon, silicon oxide, and aluminium, carried out with CST 2018 tool, are reported and compared with the classical bowtie nanoantennas ones. This study can guide both the engineering and the fabrication of plasmonic nanoantennas.

Transmission lines with undersea HVDC cables are an interesting technological solution for the supply of electrical energy to islands. The accumulation of space charge inside the dielectric layer of a HVDC cable is one of the most important element to consider in its design and during operation. The formation of space charge is due to various factors including the high dependence on the temperature of the electrical conductivity of the insulation and the establishment of a thermal gradient under load conditions. This research is focused on the space charge accumulation phenomenon around a section of a HVDC cable half dipped in water and half in air. Due to the high difference in thermal conductivity between the conductor and the insulation, the axial conduction of heat near the interface can play an important role in locally increasing the thermal gradient. The main goal of this research is to evaluate the impact of this phenomenon in the alteration of the electric field distribution. This study has been carried out by means of a 2-D thermal and electrical model of a HVDC cable developed in time domain in Matlab®. The results show the establishment of an electrical field peak near the water-air interface due to an increased thermal gradient in this area.

This paper proposes a smart sensing method for real-time monitoring of low voltage series arc fault. It is based on the wavelet coefficient mean-difference algorithm and the four spikes appearing within two fundamental periods criterion with adaptive threshold. The method also uses the hard thresholding wavelet denoising with the universal threshold. An arc fault factor and a load adaptation factor are introduced and combined with a correction factor, so allowing the selection of the adaptive threshold in real-time and the series arc fault detection.

Selective harmonics elimination or mitigation strategies are used in all applications where it is necessary to rise the efficiency and reliability of the overall system. This paper presents a simple approach to reduce the low order harmonics amplitude of an asymmetrical staircase voltage waveform for a five-level, three-phase Cascaded H-Bridge Inverter without solving non-linear equations. Through this simple approach, polynomial equations to evaluate the control angels in real-time operations have been found. The effectiveness of the harmonic mitigation method has been tested through the simulation analysis in MatLab/PLECS environment.

The numerical computation of local electromagnetic absorption at points within the human tissue is proposed by avoiding the mesh generation in the problem domain. Recently, meshless numerical methods have been introduced as an alter- native computational approach to mesh based methods. This is an important feature to generate competitive procedure able to provide final evaluations for large data amounts in real time. In this paper the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method is considered to compute the electromagnetic absorption. First experiments are performed in two dimension at single frequencies by considering incident TM plane wave on 2D cylinder simulating a simplified model of human torso. Changes on tissue electrical properties are considered assessing the numerical approach.

The single-stage converters represent an innovation in the field of power electronics thanks their features. Aim of this work consists in the improvement of the performances of quasi-Z-Source converters by adopting a modified modulation technique, which is based on the Maximum Constant Boost Control (MCBC) and Switching Frequency Optimal (SFO). The results in terms of voltage stress and harmonic content are compared with those obtained with conventional techniques, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed modulation scheme.

The paper deals with the modelling and simulation of a Fast Discharge Unit (FDU) for quench protection of the Toroidal Field (TF) magnets of the Divertor Tokamak Test, an experimental facility under design and construction in Frascati (Italy). The FDU is a safety key component that protects the superconducting magnets when a quench is detected through the fast extraction of the energy stored in superconducting magnets by adding in the TF magnets a dump (or discharge) resistor. In the paper, two different configurations of dump resistors (fixed and variable respectively) have been analysed and discussed. As a first result, it is possible to underline that the configuration with variable dump resistor is more efficient than the one with a fixed dump resistor.

In the last decade, the issue of air pollution or the reduction of CO2 emissions has become of extreme interest both for civil society and then for the industrial and scientific research world. For this reason, the scientific research on automotive is called to answer with increasingly innovative solutions. One of the principal subjects are the storage and the utilization of the electric energy for electrical and hybrid vehicles. Nowadays, supercapacitors are getting more and more attention because of their characteristics that allow them to be a bridge between electrolytic capacitors and batteries in several application such as bust-mode energy delivery, regenerative breaks and so on. The aim of this work is the modelling, simulation and characterization of a supercapacitor for the seen automotive applications.