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Solar energy‐based heating systems, which are capable of providing space heating as well as domestic hot water heating, are a promising alternative to conventional systems to achieve the status of reducing fossil energy consumption in residential buildings. Determining how suitable such systems are performing in Canada and which station is the most suitable in terms of energy‐economic‐environmental parameters are issues that have not been investigated so far. Considering that such results are very important for energy decision‐makers and investors, therefore, in the present work, the provision of space heating and hot water heating on a residential scale in 10 Canadian provinces was done by Valentin TSOL v2021 R3 software. Then nine software output parameters along with three parameters of land price, the population of each station, and the natural disaster index were weighted using the AHP method. Finally, the results of the stations were ranked using five MCDM methods including AHP, TOPSIS, WASPAS, CRITIC, and GRA. The results of numerical simulations showed that the CO2 emissions avoided parameter has the most weight, and the parameters solar contribution to DHW and boiler energy to DHW has the least weight. Also, the final ranking of each station showed that the most suitable station is Regina and the most unsuitable station is Victoria. By examining and analyzing the results, it was found that only based on the outputs of the Valentin TSOL v2021 R3 software, it is not possible to comment on finding appropriate and inappropriate stations, and the necessity of using ranking methods was observed more than before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite of being rich in fossil fuels, the Middle East is currently the main energy consumer and is projected to have the highest growth in energy demand in the world. Due to its great potential in the Middle East, solar energy can play an important role in the plans of energy decision-makers in the region. According to the studies done so far, no study has been done to show the potential benefit of using home-scale solar systems in the Middle East. Therefore, in this work for the first time, the potential of solar electricity production in the capitals of Middle Eastern countries has been studied using HOMER V2.81 software. The investigations are technical, economic, energy, and environmental, and the studied solar system is connected to the national electricity grid. The results showed that in Nicosia, due to the sale of electricity to the grid, the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is equal to -0.759 $, which is the lowest price for produced electricity and leads to a return on investment time of 5.69 years for this system. The solar fraction for the Nicosia station is 92%, which prevents the emission of more than 8 tons of CO2 pollutants during the year. The highest value of LCOE with the amount of $0.25 is related to Sana'a, whose investment return time, solar fraction, and annual CO2 emission prevention amount are 14.1 years, 53%, and 1162 kg, respectively. Ranking analysis was done on the results of 5 outputs of the HOMER software as well as 3 other influential parameters using 4 multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. TOPSIS, GRA, WSM, and AHP methods were used, and the final ranking of each station was considered the average of the 4 methods. According to the results, Cyprus and Kuwait stations were the best and worst, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital data transmission is day by day more vulnerable to both malicious and natural faults. With an aim to assure reliability, security and privacy in communication, a low‐cost fault resilient architecture for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is proposed. In order not to degrade the reliability of our AES architecture, the reliability of voter is very important, for which reason we have introduced a novel voting scheme include a majority voter (named TMR voter) and an error barrier element (named DMR voter). In this paper, a reliable and secure 32‐bit data‐path AES implementation based on our robust fault resilient approach is developed. We illustrate that the proposed architecture can tolerate up to triple‐bit (byte) simultaneous faults at each pipeline stage's logic and verify our claim through extensive error simulations. Error simulation results also show that our architecture achieves close to 100% fault‐masking capability for multiple‐bit (byte) faults. Finally, it is shown that the Application‐Specific Integrated Circuit implementation of the fault‐tolerant architectures using the composite field‐based S‐box, CFB‐AES, and ROM‐based S‐box, RB‐AES allows better area usage, throughput and fault resilience trade‐off compared to their counterparts. So, it provides the most appropriate features to be used in highly‐secure resource‐constraint applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petrophysical properties have played an important and definitive role in the study of oil and gas reservoirs, necessitating that diverse kinds of information are used to infer these properties. In this study, the seismic data related to the Hendijan oil field were utilised, along with the available logs of 7 wells of this field, in order to use the extracted relationships between seismic attributes and the values of the shale volume in the wells to estimate the shale volume in wells intervals. After the overall survey of data, a seismic line was selected and seismic inversion methods (model‐based, band limited and sparse spike inversion) were applied to it. Amongst all of these techniques, the model‐based method presented the better results. By using seismic attributes and artificial neural networks, the shale volume was then estimated using three types of neural networks, namely the probabilistic neural network (PNN), multi‐layer feed‐forward network (MLFN) and radial basic function network (RBFN). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Next‐generation sequencing techniques have dramatically increased the amount of genomic data being sequenced, which calls for the acceleration of the alignment algorithms. This article proposes an FPGA‐based accelerated implementation of the seed extension kernel of the Burrows–Wheeler alignment genomic mapping algorithm. The well‐known Smith–Waterman algorithm is used during the seed extension to find the optimum alignment between the sequences. The state‐of‐the‐art architectures in the literature use one‐dimensional (1‐D) systolic arrays to fill a similarity matrix, based on the best score out of all match combinations, mismatches and gaps are computed. The cells on the same anti‐diagonal are computed in parallel in these architectures. We propose a novel 2‐dimensional architecture in which all the cells on the same rows and the same columns are computed in parallel and, thereby, significantly accelerated the process. The similarity matrix cells are computed in two phases: (1) the calculation phase and (2) error compensation phase. The calculation phase roughly approximate the cell values and the approximation error is fixed up during the error compensation phase. Our simulation results show that the proposed architecture can be up to 718x and 1.7x faster than the software execution and the 1‐D systolic arrays, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grapevine ( Vitis vinifera) is one of the most important fruits in Iran where the provinces of Qazvin, Lorestan and Markazi are main producers. During 2013-2015, vineyards located in these provinces were surveyed to verify the presence of phytoplasma. The sample collection was based on symptomatology including decline, leaf yellowing and shortening of internodes. Total DNA was extracted from symptomatic and symptomless grapevine samples and used in nested-polymerase chain reaction ( PCR) assays with phytoplasma ribosomal primers (P1/Tint followed by R16F2n/R2, R16mF1/ mR1, R16(I)F1/R1 or 6R758f/16R1232r). Nested- PCR products were obtained only for symptomatic samples while samples from symptomless plants yielded no PCR products. Restriction fragment length polymorphism ( RFLP) analyses with Tru1I, TaqI and Tsp509I and direct sequencing of amplicons followed by phylogenetic analyses indicated the presence of ' Candidatus Phytoplasma fraxini', ' Ca. P. aurantifolia', ' Ca. P. solani' and ' Ca. P. phoenicium'-related strains. In Marzaki province, there ' Ca. P. aurantifolia' strains were mainly detected, while in the other two provinces, all the four ' Candidatus species' were identified with the prevalence of ' Ca. P. solani'-related strains. In both provinces in one case, mixed phytoplasma infection was also detected by RFLP analyses. The presence of different phytoplasmas in positive samples indicates great phytosanitary significance due to grapevine economic importance for country. Grapevine phytoplasma infection represents a threat for other crops suggesting grapevine as alternative host species for the phytoplasmas already reported in Iran, while the ' Ca. P. fraxini' is for the first time identified in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]