Current solutions of coral restoration rely mainly on fragmentation. Though a reliable technique, this asexual form of reproduction does not benefit the genetic diversity of the coral reef. With many global and local stressors threatening corals’ existence, the resiliency of corals to future ocean conditions depends highly on sexual reproduction to produce new genotypes. New technology allows coral spawning/larval release, larval settlement and rearing to be carried out in an aquarium system. Many of the techniques necessary to maintain coral recruits are well-established, however the effects of light intensity remain to be studied for these early life stages. Newly settled corals have been found on vertical surfaces and the undersides of ledges and crevices, suggesting full solar irradiance is detrimental to their health. Newly settled Porites astreoides and Agaricia agaricites recruits were placed under varying irradiance levels to test their survivorship, growth and pigmentation. In the first four weeks post-settlement, growth was significantly different between recruits under a PAR of 10 µmol quanta m-2 s-1 and 240 µmol quanta m-2 s-1. In a separate experiment, growth curves were significantly different between six different irradiance increase regimens in the first 14 weeks post-settlement. This study shows, for the first time, a definitive preference by newly settled coral recruits to lower intensity irradiance, devoid of ultraviolet radiation, in the first four weeks post-settlement, and that Porites astreoides recruits can acclimatize to higher intensities at a rate of ~ 11 µmol quanta m-2 s-1 per week for up to 15 weeks.

Coral reef decline worldwide has led to the need for coral reef restoration. The use of sexual reproduction in restoration efforts is required to increase genetic diversity; however, the procedures for rearing newly-settled coral recruits ex situ still need to be optimized. Recruits initially require low light irradiance, but it is unclear when higher irradiances are required to enhance growth and survival. Here we determined the optimal light regime for Orbicella faveolata and Acropora cervicornis recruits. Newly settled recruits were reared under treatments with varied rates of increasing irradiance (after reaching 5 weeks of age), and their survival, growth, and coloration was assessed weekly until they were 16 weeks old. Orbicella faveolata and Acropora cervicornis growth and survival were significantly affected by light irradiance regimes. Coloration also varied between treatments with a general trend of darkening pigmentation over the sixteen weeks. We found that low irradiances (< 40 mmol photons m-2s-1) were optimal for new recruits up to 8-10 weeks of age, which is possibly related to the full establishment of symbiosis and/or the ability to feed and digest food. Aposymbiotic recruits were able to survive for a longer period under low irradiances but experienced high mortality when exposed to higher irradiance, regardless of their age, possibly due to low levels or the lack of mycosporine like amino acids and other antioxidants produced by the Symbiodiniaceae that protect against high irradiances and reactive oxygen species. After Weeks 8-10, high irradiance levels similar to the ones that are optimal for adults (> 120 mmol photons m-2s-1) were required by zooxanthellate coral to survive and to boost their growth. This further suggests that the acquisition of symbionts from the family Symbiodiniaceae is at least one key component in the shift toward tolerating higher irradiances.

The chemical reaction of the first excited electronic state of molecular nitrogen, N₂(A), with ground state atomic oxygen is an important contributor to thermospheric nitric oxide (NO).  The importance is assessed by including this reaction in a one-dimensional photochemical model.  The method is to scale the photoelectron impact ionization rate of molecular nitrogen by a Gaussian centered near 100 km. Large uncertainties remain in the temperature dependence and branching ratios of many reactions important to NO production and loss. Similarly large uncertainties are present in the solar soft x-ray irradiance, known to be the fundamental driver of the low-latitude NO.  To illustrate, it is shown that the equatorial, midday NO density measured by the Student Nitric Oxide Explorer (SNOE) satellite near the Solar Cycle 23 maximum can be recovered by the model to within the 20% measurement uncertainties using two rather different but equally reasonable chemical schemes, each with their own solar soft-xray irradiance parameterizations.  Including the N₂(A) changes the NO production rate by an average of 11%, but the NO density changes by a much larger 44%.  This is explained by tracing the direct, indirect, and catalytic contributions of N₂(A) to NO, finding them to contribute 40%, 33%, and 27% respectively. The contribution of N₂(A) relative to the total NO production and loss is assessed by tracing both back to their origins in the primary photoabsorption and photoelectron impact processes.  The photoelectron impact ionization of N₂ is shown to be the main driver of the midday NO production while the photoelectron impact dissociation of N₂ is the main NO destroyer.  The net photoelectron impact excitation rate of N₂, which is responsible for the N₂(A) production, is larger than the ionization and dissociation rates and thus potentially very important.   Although the conservative assumptions regarding the level-specific NO yield from the N₂(A)+O reaction results in N₂(A) being a somewhat minor contributor, N₂(A) production is found to be the most efficient producer of NO among the thermospheric energy deposition processes. / Ph. D.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Recently, the concept of “bulk-fill” resin-based composites (RBCs) has been re-emphasized, with claimed improvements in depth of cure (DOC) with similar mechanical properties and comparable adaptation to walls and margins relative to conventional composite. More research is needed to carefully examine the properties of these new materials. The objective of this study was to measure the light energy, microhardness (VHN), and elastic modulus across the depth of one conventional and three bulk-fill RBCs. Materials and Methods: Three commercially available bulk-fill RBCs (Tetric EvoCeram Bulk Fill [TE], SonicFill [SF], X-tra fill[XF]) and one conventional RBC (Premise [PR]) were evaluated (n = 10). DOC (using Vickers’s microhardness), elastic modulus (using atomic force microscopy), and the mean irradiance and total light energy transmitted through different thicknesses of RBC were measured by a spectrometer. The effects of group, location, and curing depth on VHN were analyzed using mixed-model ANOVA. Elastic modulus and light energy comparisons were made using two-way ANOVA, with a significance level of 5 percent. Results: There was a significant difference in the depths for the mean irradiance and total energy between different depths in all materials. All materials achieved the manufacturers’ claimed DOC. XF had the highest DOC with 7 mm and a light energy of 0.56± 0.02 J/cm2 at 7 mm. PR had the lowest DOC with 3 mm and a light energy of 0.84 ±0.12 J/cm2 at 3 mm. The elastic modulus showed significant variation in depth profiles that were different than the DOC. Significance: The manufacturers’ claims for bulk-fill DOC were achieved using a microhardness method. However, this method failed to detect the quality of the polymerization. Assessment of the elastic modulus using AFM is a promising method for greater understanding of the polymerization.

Accurate solar generation forecasting is critical for ensuring power system reliability, economics, and effectiveness and controlling the supply-demand balance. This research offers novel multi-branch spatio-temporal forecasting models to improve forecasting accuracy and minimize forecasting errors. The first step is to build temporal models employing advanced deep learning architectures, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and GRU with Attention (AttGRU). Next, spatio-temporal solar forecasting models are constructed. A novel multi-branch Attentive Gated Recurrent Residual network (ResAttGRU) consisting of multiple branches of residual networks (ResNet), GRU, and the attention mechanism is introduced. The proposed multi-branch ResAttGRU is capable of modeling data at various resolutions, extracting hierarchical features, and capturing short- and long-term dependencies. Moreover, this network also presents a strong multi-time-scale representative, while GRUs can exploit temporal information at less computational cost than the popular LSTM. The novelty of the developed architecture is in the utilization of multiple convolutional-based branches to learn multi-time-scale features jointly, accelerate the learning process, and reduce overfitting. This dissertation also compares the multi-branch ResAttGRU networks with state-of-the-art deep learning methods using 18 years of NSRDB data at 12 solar sites. The proposed multi-branch ResAttGRU requires 7.1% fewer parameters than multi-branch residual LSTM (ResLSTM) while achieving similar average RMSE, MAE, and R-squared values. Finally, to effectively model spatial correlation among neighboring solar sites as well as to alleviate performance degradation due to overfitting of conventional neural networks, a spatio-temporal framework comprised of concatenated multi-branch Residual network and Transformer (ResTrans) is developed. Numerical results indicate that the multi-branch ResTrans structure achieves the highest forecasting accuracy, with an average RMSE of 0.049 ( W/m^2 ), an average MAE of 0.031 (W/m^2 ), and a R^2 coefficient of 97%. / Electrical and Computer Engineering

The performance of lasercom systems operating in the atmosphere is reduced by optical turbulence, which causes irradiance fluctuations in the received signal. The result is a randomly fading signal. Fade statistics for lasercom systems are determined from the probability density function (PDF) of the irradiance fluctuations. The expected number of fades per second and their mean fade time require the joint PDF of the fluctuating irradiance and its time derivative. Theoretical integral expressions, as well as closed form, analytical approximations, were developed for the joint PDF of a gamma-gamma distributed irradiance and its time derivative, and the corresponding expression for the expected number of fades per second. The new approximation for the conditional PDF of the time derivative of a gamma-gamma irradiance is a zero mean Gaussian distribution, with a complicated irradiance depending variance. Fade statistics obtained from experimental data were compared to theoretical predictions based on the lognormal and gamma-gamma distributions. A Gaussian beam wave was propagated through the atmosphere along a horizontal path, near ground, in the moderate-to-strong optical turbulence. To characterize the propagation path, a new method that infers atmospheric propagation parameters was developed. Scintillation theory combined with a numerical scheme was used to infer the structure constant, Cn2, the inner scale and the outer scale from the optical measurements. The inferred parameters were used in calculations for the theoretical PDFs. It was found that fade predictions made by the gamma-gamma and lognormal distributions provide an upper and lower bound, respectively, for the probability of fade and the number of fades per second for irradiance data collected in the moderate-to-strong fluctuation regime. Aperture averaging effects on the PDF of the irradiance fluctuations were investigated by comparing the irradiance distributions for the three receiver apertures at two different values of the structure parameter and, hence, different values of the coherence radius. For the moderate-to-strong fluctuation regime, the gamma-gamma distribution provides a good fit to the irradiance fluctuations collected by finite-sized apertures that are significantly smaller than the coherence radius. For apertures larger than or equal to the coherence radius, the irradiance fluctuations appear to be lognormally distributed.

A propagation experiment was designed, assembled, and conducted on an extended range to verify theoretical temporal models for weak to strong fluctuation theory. Laser light intensity was propagated over terrain at the Kennedy Space Center (Florida), and detected using optical receivers at a distance of 13.3 Km from the optical source. The intensity data from the experiment was used to generate an experimental Power Spectral Density (PSD) function. The theoretical Mutual Coherence Function (MCF) and Wave Structure Function (WSF) as set forth by Andrews/Phillips , were evaluated to determine the effective relationship between the statistical moments of the random optical field and the laser light intensity. Two scales of interest were identified (refractive large-scale and diffractive small-scale) and plotted revealing the characteristic shape of each component. In addition, statistical principles applied to the correlation/covariance function relationship and a graphical convolution process were used to generate a theoretical PSD function. Further, utilizing Taylor's "frozen turbulence" hypothesis an analysis of the theoretical temporal covariance function was performed. Functional forms for refractive and diffractive log-irradiance components were developed and used to generate a second theoretical PSD function. Finally, the experimental and theoretical Power Spectral Density functions are plotted on the same graph and a comparison is performed.

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Before vehicles were heavily relied on coal, fossil fuels and wind for power.  Now, they are rapidly being replaced by electric vehicles and or plug-in hybrid electric cars. But these electric cars are still faced with the problem of energy availability because they rely on energy from biomass, hydro power and wind turbines for power generation. The abundance of solar radiation and its use as solar energy as a power source in driving these rapidly increasing electric cars is not only an important decision but also a necessary condition for eradication of environmental pollution. This study presents a model for charging electric cars from solar energy. Little focus on detailed technologies involved from solar energy capture to battery charging but our main focus is how to provide a modified charging parking lot in Karlskrona city-Sweden. With a surface area of 2850m2, we were able to choose 1STH-350-WH as the right PV modules. Based on the latitude of our design area, a computed 71 degrees angle positioning between solar panel and roof so as to maximise the surface area and optimise the solar irradiance gathering. Based on the power output of approximately116kW these PV modules generated, we further analysed and selected SDP 30KW inverter and Monocrystalline Silicon (1SolTech 1STH-350-WH (350W) solar modules. Also we provide different car charging method by choosing the SAE J1772 standard as one of specifications for dedicated vehicle charging and Clipper Creek HSC-40 as our option of charger. With the data of the generating solar energy every day, charging time, consuming power, we can estimate how many cars the system can handle to charge. Moreover, our system provides AC power from AC power network by general socket type F. We finally concluded that, our model for charging of electric car batteries was not only supportive but efficient in terms of extracting solar energy from sunlight to charge electric cars, thus making the region an eco-friendly place.

Face aux sources d’énergie épuisables et polluantes, la production d’électricité par énergie solaire à concentration photovoltaïque (CPV) connaît depuis 2010 une croissance significative. Les systèmes ayant les plus hauts rendements (< 29%) sont constitués de trackers à deux axes combinés à des modules à modules (CPV) allant de 300x à 2500x, intégrant des cellules PV à triple jonction, dont l’efficacité mesurée en laboratoire est supérieure à 35%. Les pertes des systèmes sont dues aux conditions de fonctionnement extérieures fluctuantes, parmi lesquelles : la température, le contenu spectral du flux lumineux, la taille variable du disque solaire et la précision du suivi soumis à des limites physiques et des charges de vents variables. L’industrie tente de pallier à ces difficultés par des dispositifs à concentrations optique à angle d’acceptance (AA) large. Mais la caractérisation en laboratoire de tout dispositif doit être complétée par des tests en conditions externes. Ce projet consiste en la conception et la réalisation d’un banc d’essai extérieur de caractérisation de modules CPV, sous conditions réelles et variables, au moyen de tests I-V. Les données sont archivées sur une base de données, et prétraitées pour analyses des résultats. Les objectifs de caractérisation ont été atteints, soit le positionnement ponctuel précis en azimut et en élévation lors d’un test I-V, la répétition de cette étape selon des protocoles ajustables. Six dispositifs CPV à large AA ont été caractérisés en même temps (plus de 146 000 lectures). Des suggestions sont faites pour corriger les problèmes rencontrés. Des questions de recherches ultérieures sont posées, l’ensemble confirmant la pertinence de ce type de banc d’essai.