Ultra-fine hydrogen produced by electrochemical water splitting without carbon emission is a high-density energy carrier, which could gradually substitute the usage of traditional fossil fuels. The development of high-performance electrocatalysts at affordable costs is one of the major research priorities in order to achieve the large-scale implementation of a green hydrogen supply chain. In this work, the development of a vanadium-doped FeBP (V-FeBP) microsphere croissant (MSC) electrocatalyst is demonstrated to exhibit efficient bi-functional water splitting for the first time. The FeBP MSC electrode is synthesized by a hydrothermal approach along with the systematic control of growth parameters such as precursor concentration, reaction duration, reaction temperature and post-annealing, etc. Then, the heteroatom doping of vanadium is performed on the best FeBP MSC by a simple soaking approach. The best optimized V-FeBP MSC demonstrates the low HER and OER overpotentials of 52 and 180 mV at 50 mA/cm² in 1 M KOH in a three-electrode system. In addition, the two-electrode system, i.e., V-FeBP || V-FeBP, demonstrates a comparable water-splitting performance to the benchmark electrodes of Pt/C || RuO₂ in 1 M KOH. Similarly, exceptional performance is also observed in natural sea water. The 3D MSC flower-like structure provides a very high surface area that favors rapid mass/electron-transport pathways, which improves the electrocatalytic activity. Further, the V-FeBP electrode is examined in different pH solutions and in terms of its stability under industrial operational conditions at 60 °C in 6 M KOH, and it shows excellent stability.

In this work, a novel hybrid SERS platform incorporating hybrid core-shell (HyCoS) AuPd nanoparticles (NPs) and MoS₂ nanoplatelets has been successfully demonstrated for strong surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) enhancement of Rhodamine 6G (R6G). A significantly improved SERS signal of R6G is observed on the hybrid SERS platform by adapting both electromagnetic mechanism (EM) and chemical mechanism (CM) in a single platform. The EM enhancement originates from the unique plasmonic HyCoS AuPd NP template fabricated by the modified droplet epitaxy, which exhibits strong plasmon excitation of hotspots at the nanogaps of metallic NPs and abundant generation of electric fields by localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR). Superior LSPR results from the coupling of distinctive AuPd core-shell NP and high-density background Au NPs. The CM enhancement is associated with the charge transfer from the MoS₂ nanoplatelets to the R6G. The direct contact via mixing approach with optimal mixing ratio can effectively facilitate the charges transfer to the HOMO and LUMO of R6G, leading to the orders of Raman signal amplification. The enhancement factor (EF) for the proposed hybrid platform reaches ~10¹⁰ for R6G on the hybrid SERS platform.

With the fast proliferation of mobile Internet, the wireless community has been increasingly looking for a framework that can provide seamless mobility. In this paper, we propose a fast cross-layer handover scheme based on movement prediction in mobile WiMAX environment. Prediction is achieved by linear regression model with keeping track of the signal strength of mobile users. With the help of the prediction, layer-3 handover activities are able to occur prior to layer-2 handover, and therefore, total handover latency can be reduced. The experiments conducted with system parameters and propagation model defined by WiMAX Forum demonstrate that the proposed method predicts the future signal level accurately and reduces the total handover latency.

Hydrogen is one of the most promising green energy alternatives due to its high gravimetric energy density, zero-carbon emissions, and other advantages. In this work, a CoFeBP micro-flower (MF) electrocatalyst is fabricated as an advanced water-splitting electrocatalyst by a hydrothermal approach for hydrogen production with the highly efficient hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The fabrication process of the CoFeBP MF electrocatalyst is systematically optimized by thorough investigations on various hydrothermal synthesis and post-annealing parameters. The best optimized CoFeBP MF electrode demonstrates HER/OER overpotentials of 20 mV and 219 mV at 20 mA/cm². The CoFeBP MFs also exhibit a low 2-electrode (2-E) cell voltage of 1.60 V at 50 mA/cm², which is comparable to the benchmark electrodes of Pt/C and RuO₂. The CoFeBP MFs demonstrate excellent 2-E stability of over 100 h operation under harsh industrial operational conditions at 60 °C in 6 M KOH at a high current density of 1000 mA/cm². The flower-like morphology can offer a largely increased electrochemical active surface area (ECSA), and systematic post-annealing can lead to improved crystallinity in CoFeBP MFs.

One of the main limitations for 3D streaming services on IPTV is network bandwidth mismatch due to the large size of 3D video traffic. It causes fatal decoding errors and mosaic-like damage. This paper presents a hybrid frame discard method to address the problem. The main idea of the proposed method is combining the selective frame discard methodology with 2D-to-3D conversion technique, which enables efficient utilization of the network bandwidth. In the proposed method, the frames to be discarded are selected after consideration of the support of 2D-to-3D conversion, the network bandwidth, and the inter-frame dependency relationship within a group of pictures (GOPs). The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the media quality of 3D video streaming even in bad network conditions. The proposed method is expected to be practically utilized in 3D IPTV system.