This thesis is focused on the monitoring system in the fleet management. Frauds are increasingly caused due to company cars. The emphasis is put especially on costs saving resulting from the introduction of the monitoring and a more effective control. The work defines modern elements of control, their functions and impact on costs. It outlines pros and cons connected with the journey log. Practical examples are given as an illustration, including an alternative solution with a savings calculation.

The notorious fuel consumption and environmental impact of conventional diesel refuse collection trucks (D-RCTs) encourage collection fleets to adopt alternative technologies with higher efficiency and lower emissions/noise impacts into their fleets. Due to the nature of refuse trucks’ duty cycles with low driving speeds, frequent braking and high idling time, a battery-electric refuse collection truck (BE-RCT) seems a promising alternative, taking advantage of energy-saving potentials along with zero tailpipe emissions. However, whether or not this newly-introduced technology can be commercially feasible for a collection fleet and/or additionally mitigate GHG emissions should be examined over its lifetime explicitly for the specific fleet. This study evaluates the performance of a D-RCT and BE-RCT in a collection fleet to assess the potential of BE-RCT in reducing diesel fuel consumption and the total GHG emissions. A refuse truck duty cycle (RTDC) was generated representing the driving nature and vocational operation of the refuse truck, including the speed, mass, and hydraulic cycles along with the extracted route grade profile. As a case study, the in-use data of a collection fleet, operating in the municipality of Saanich, British Columbia (BC), Canada, are applied to develop the representative duty cycle. Using the ADVISOR simulator, the D-RCT and BE-RCT are modeled and energy consumption of the trucks are estimated over the representative duty cycle. Fuel-based Well-to-Wheel (WTW) GHG emissions of the trucks are estimated considering the fuel (diesel/electricity) upstream and downstream GHG emissions over the 100-year horizon impact factor for greenhouse gases. The results showed that the BE-RCT reduces energy use by 77.7% and WTW GHG emissions by 98% compared to the D-RCT, taking advantage of the clean grid power in BC. Also, it was indicated that minimum battery capacity of 220 kWh is required for the BE-RCT to meet the duty cycle requirements for the examined fleet. A sensitivity analysis has been done to investigate the impact of key parameters on energy use and corresponding GHG emissions of the trucks. Further, the lifetime total cost of ownership (TCO) for both trucks was estimated to assess the financial competitiveness of the BE-RCT over the D-RCT. The TCO indicated that the BE-RCT deployment is not financially viable for the examined fleet unless there are considerable incentives towards the purchase cost of the BE-RCT and/or sufficient increase in carbon tax/diesel fuel price. From the energy useevaluation, this study estimates the required battery capacity of the BE-RCT for the studied fleet, and the TCO outputs can assist them in future planning for the adoption of battery-electric refuse trucks into their collection fleet where the cost parameters evolve. / Graduate

This study analyzes how, in a possible electrification of the car fleet through plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), the choice of objective function, which potentially reflects different stakeholders’ interests, may influence the resulting optimal PHEV battery range, the PHEV share in the vehicle fleet, the fleet total cost of ownership (TCO) savings, and the fleet electric drive fraction under various economic conditions and policy options. The optimal battery range can differ considerably among objective functions, especially between the objectives of maximizing the number of PHEVs and maximizing driving on electricity. Increased viability of the PHEV, for instance, through lower battery costs, higher running cost savings, or PHEV-promoting subsidies, will strengthen this effect. Therefore, a high share of viable PHEVs in the vehicle fleet does not necessarily result in a high share of electric driving. When designing policies to promote PHEVs, both the short- and long-term policy objectives and their potential effects need to be considered explicitly.

In previous works, we have shown two-car households to be better suited than one-car households for leveraging the potential benefits of the battery electric vehicle (BEV), both when the BEV simply replaces the second car and when it is used optimally in combination with a conventional car to overcome the BEV’s range limitation and increase its utilization. Based on a set of GPS-measured car movement data from 64 two-car households in Sweden, we here assess the potential electric driving of a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) in a two-car household and compare the resulting economic viability and potential fuel substitution to that of a BEV. Using estimates of near-term mass production costs, our results suggest that, for Swedish two-car households, the PHEV in general should have a higher total cost of ownership than the BEV, provided the use of the BEV is optimized. However, the PHEV will increasingly be favored if, for example, drivers cannot or do not want to optimize usage. In addition, the PHEV and the BEV are not perfect substitutes. The PHEV may be favored if drivers require that the vehicle be able to satisfy all driving needs (i.e., if drivers don’t accept the range and charge-time restrictions of the BEV) or if drivers requires an even larger battery in the BEV to counter range anxiety. We find that, given a particular usage strategy, the electric drive fraction (EDF) of the vehicle fleet is less dependent on whether PHEVs or BEVs are used to replace one of the conventional cars in two-car households. Instead, the EDF depends more on the usage strategy, i.e., on whether the PHEV/BEV is used to replace the conventional car with the higher annual mileage (“the first car”), the less used car (“the second car”), or is used flexibly to substitute for either in order to optimize use. For example, from a fuel replacement perspective it is often better to replace the first car with a PHEV than to replace the second with a BEV.

Road freight transportation is important for the development of the global economy and, at the same time, one of the most destructive businesses when it comes to the environment and human health. As societies evolve, the need for freight transportation increases and the transport demand cannot in a sustainable way be fulfilled with the use of diesel trucks as it is done today. For the sake of our environment, the electrification transition needs to ramp up. However, when it comes to covering long distances with an electric truck, problems arise due to the lack of sufficient driving strategies, technology, and infrastructure adapted to the needs for long-distance electrified transportation. Therefore, different battery-electric truck solutions need to be evaluated to identify an economically, socially, and environmentally friendly way of operating. Consequently, the purpose of this master's thesis is the following:  From a carrier operation perspective, identify different solutions for electrified long-haul transportation and evaluate how cost competitive they are based on triple bottom line. To fulfill this purpose the study was divided into two steps, where the first one was to, through literature and interviews, identify different solutions for electric long-haul transportation and external parameters affecting these solutions. The parameters and solutions were then combined with different distances into focus cases. The second step consisted of identifying both internal and external cost drivers, which were used to create a cost model that considered environmental, economic, and social sustainability. The cost model was then used to evaluate the different focus cases to determine their competitiveness. The solutions were based on wire charging, a 300-, 450-, or 624 kWh battery, and were operated either through trailer swap or point-to-point. The external parameters that were the most important ones were battery degradation, the electricity market, and prerequisites for effective logistics. These were all combined into focus cases which were evaluated on the distances 300-, 400-, 500-, and 600 km. The cost model that was used included both internal and external costs to cover the economic, environmental, and social perspectives in the evaluation. To evaluate the focus cases and be able to compare it to a diesel solution the model considered the costs that differ between a battery electric truck and a diesel truck, which at an overall level was electricity cost, charging infrastructure, batteries, salary when charging, environmental, and social costs. For the distance of 300 km, the most competitive combination was wire charging, 300 kWh battery, and trailer swap. For the distances 400- and 500 km the best combination was wire charge, 450 kWh battery, and trailer swap. The best solution for 500 km was wire charge, 624 kWh battery, and trailer swap. The conclusion is, from a carrier operation perspective, that the most competitive solution to use is based on trailer swap, including a battery with a capacity that is adapted to the distance where the batteries can be charged through wire charging at a charger with a high utilization factor. Finally, for shorter distances, a battery electric truck is cost-competitive against a diesel truck. However, at longer distances a battery electric truck's competitiveness in comparison to a diesel truck gets worse, but at all distances the battery electric truck solution is both socially and environmentally beneficial in comparison to a diesel alternative.

Starting from small scale laboratories to the highly sophisticated industrial facilities, monitoring and control forms the most integral part. In order to perform this continuous monitoring we require an interface, that would operate between the system and its processing conditions and in turn which facilitates us to act accordingly. This interface is called as a sensor. There are various types of sensors available which have wide range of functionality in various different fields. The use of transparent conducting oxide (TCO) in the field of sensor applications has increased and has been the subject of extensive research. Good electrical properties, good optical properties, wide band gap, portability, easy processing, and low cost has led to the extensive research on TCO for sensor applications. For this research purpose two specific types of sensor applications namely, light sensing and humidity sensing were considered. For this purpose, two sets of metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFET) with one set having transparent aluminum doped zinc oxide and the other having indium tin oxide respectively as their gate metal was fabricated. The MOSFETs were fabricated using a four level mask and tested.

In thin film solar cells there is a front contact layer called TCO, transparent conducting oxide. This layer requires high conductivity and high transmittance. Different materials such as Tin doped indium oxide (ITO) and Aluminum doped zinc oxide (AZO) are current good alternatives but several other materials are investigated to find even better materials. One of them is tungsten doped indium oxide (IOW). This project was about investigating the deposition process for IOW and characterize the properties of IOW thin film to investigate the possibilities for implementing this material as a contact layer in thin film solar cells. The results from the two batches of depositions varied a lot. Some samples came out dark, but some were transparent and had a high transmittance, suitable for a TCO. The highest transmittance reached through this process was around 95 % in the infrared (IR) range and around 90 % in the visible range. When it comes to the resistivity, no IOW-samples reaches desired levels for a TCO. The lowest resistivity reached was 6.36 * 10-4 W cm. The results showed that the sample with the lowest resistivity was the undoped material, which is contradicting the current theory on the subject. The lowest resistivity for the IOW film was 6.50 * 10-3 W cm.

The cloud is evolving due to additional demands introduced by new technological advancements and the wide movement toward digitalization. Therefore, next-generation data centers (DCs) and clouds are expected (and need) to become cheaper, more efficient, and capable of offering more predictable services. Aligned with this, we examine the concept of software-defined “hardware” infrastructures (SDHI) based on hardware resource disaggregation as one possible way of realizing next-generation DCs. We start with an overview of the functional architecture of a cloud based on SDHI. Following this, we discuss a series of use-cases and deployment scenarios enabled by SDHI and explore the role of each functional block of SDHI’s architecture, i.e., cloud infrastructure, cloud platforms, cloud execution environments, and applications. Next, we propose a framework to evaluate the impact of SDHI on techno-economic efficiency of DCs, specifically focusing on application profiling, hardware dimensioning, and total cost of ownership (TCO). Our study shows that combining resource disaggregation and software-defined capabilities makes DCs less expensive and easier to expand; hence they can rapidly follow the exponential demand growth. Additionally, we elaborate on technologies behind SDHI, its challenges, and its potential future directions. Finally, to identify a suitable memory management scheme for SDHI and show its advantages, we focus on the management of Last Level Cache (LLC) in currently available Intel processors. Aligned with this, we investigate how better management of LLC can provide higher performance, more predictable response time, and improved isolation between threads. More specifically, we take advantage of LLC’s non-uniform cache architecture (NUCA) in which the LLC is divided into “slices,” where access by the core to which it closer is faster than access to other slices. Based upon this, we introduce a new memory management scheme, called slice-aware memory management, which carefully maps the allocated memory to LLC slices based on their access time latency rather than the de facto scheme that maps them uniformly. Many applications can benefit from our memory management scheme with relatively small changes. As an example, we show the potential benefits that Key-Value Store (KVS) applications gain by utilizing our memory management scheme. Moreover, we discuss how this scheme could be used to provide explicit CPU slicing – which is one of the expectations of SDHI  and hardware resource disaggregation. / <p>QC 20190415</p>

Die vorliegende Dissertation befasst sich mit dem RF- überlagerten DC-Sputtern von Indiumzinnoxid und aluminiumdotierten Zinkoxid. Bei dem dafür entwickelten synchron gepulsten RF/DC-Verfahren werden die zu untersuchenden Materialien gleichzeitig mit Hilfe eines RF- und eines PulsDC-Generators gesputtert. Ein wesentliches Resultat der Untersuchungen ist, dass durch RF- überlagertes DCSputtern Schichten abgeschieden werden können, die im Vergleich zum DC- bzw. PulsDC-Sputtern geringere spezifische Widerstände aufweisen. Dies ist auf eine Verringerung von Defekten in den abgeschiedenen Schichten zurückzuführen. Es konnte anhand der Untersuchungen gezeigt werden, dass fur die Abscheidung von Indiumzinnoxid und aluminiumdotiertem Zinkoxid die Substrattemperatur beim RF überlagerten DC-Sputtern gegenüber dem DC-Sputtern um bis zu 100°C verringert werden kann.

Fundação de Apoio a Pesquisa e à Inovação Tecnológica do Estado de Sergipe - FAPITEC/SE / In this work, we analyze the structural, optical and electrical properties of thin films of ZnO - doped with aluminum (Al) and chromium (Cr), with concentrations of 3%, grown by non - reactive magnetron sputtering. The samples were grown using glass as substrates. For the production of the capacitors used in the electric characterization an Al layer was grown on the substrate which was used as the lower electrode. The films studied here were obtained by varying the thickness and temperature of the substrate, between ambient temperature and 400 ° C. The films obtained were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray reflectometry (XRR), optical spectroscopy in the UV-Vis region, and IxV voltage current plotes. The results showed that the films produced have a large preferential orientation with planes (002) of the ZnO wurtzite hexagonal phase perpendicular to the surface of the substrate. By means of the XRR measurements, the experimental thicknesses were obtained as well as the roughness and mass density of the films. From the UV-Vis measurements, it was observed that the films have a high transmittance (above 80%) with a slight reduction with increasing thickness. The measurements of the IxV curves showed that the films have an ohmic behavior with a low resistance and resistivity, therefore possessing compatible properties to be used with conductive oxides and transparent for both dopants. The bandgap values for all films are close to 3.3 eV without significant variation with the parameters used. / Neste trabalho, são apresentadas discussões sobre as propriedades estruturais, óticas e elétricas de filmes finos de ZnO — dopado com alumínio (Al) e cromo (Cr), com concentrações de 3%, crescidos por pulverização catódica não reativa. As amostras foram crescidas utilizando vidro como substratos. Para a produção dos capacitores utilizados na caracterização elétrica foi crescido uma camada de Al sobre o substrato que foi utilizado como eletrodo inferior. Os filmes aqui estudados foram obtidos variando a espessura e a temperatura do substrato, entre temperatura ambiente e 400 °C. Os filmes obtidos foram caracterizados pelas técnicas de difração de raios X (DRX), reflectometria de raios X (XRR), espectroscopia óptica na região do UV-Vis e curvas de corrente por tensão IxV. Os resultados mostraram que os filmes produzidos possuem uma grande orientação preferencial com planos (002) da fase hexagonal wurtzita do ZnO perpendicular à superfície do substrato. Por meio das medidas de XRR, foram obtidas as espessuras experimentais assim como a rugosidade e densidade de massa dos filmes. A partir das medidas de UV-Vis, foi observado que os filmes possuem uma alta transmitância (acima de 80%) com uma leve redução com o aumento da espessura. As medidas das curvas IxV mostraram que os filmes apresentam um comportamento ôhmico com uma baixa resistência e resistividade, possuindo, portanto, propriedades compatíveis para serem utilizados como óxido condutore e transparente para ambos os dopantes. Os valores do bandgap para todos os filmes são próximos de 3,3 eV sem variação significativa com os parâmetros utilizados. / São Cristóvão, SE