A coaxial triboelectric nanogenerator fiber for both energy harvesting and sensing was developed by using aligned carbon nanotube sheets.

This paper employs an optimization algorithm called the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) for the parameter estimation of the soil water retention curve model. The SSA simulates the behavior of searching for food of the salp swarm and manages to find the optimal solutions for optimization problems. In this paper, parameter estimation of the van Genuchten model based on nine soil samples, covering eight soil textures, is conducted. The optimization problem that minimizes the difference between the measured and the estimated water content is formulated, and the SSA is applied to solve this problem. To validate the competitive advantage of the SSA, the experimental results are compared with Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm, the Differential Evolution algorithm and the RETC program, which indicates that SSA performs better than the three methods.

In this paper, a novel method is developed for day-ahead daily river-flow forecasting based on convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed method incorporates both spatial and temporal information to improve the forecasting performance. A CNN model is usually trained by minimizing the mean squared error which is, however, sensitive to few particularly large errors. This character of squared error loss function will result in a poor estimator. To tackle the problem, a robust loss function is proposed to train the CNN. To facilitate the training of CNNs for multiple sites forecasting, transfer learning is also applied in this study. With transfer learning, a new CNN inherits the structure and partial learnable parameters from a well-trained CNN to reduce the training complexity. The forecasting performance of the proposed method is validated with real data of four rivers by comparing with widely used benchmarking models including the autoregressive model, multilayer perception network, kernel ridge regression, radial basis function neural network, and generic CNN. Numerical results show that the proposed method performs best in terms of the root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percentage error. The two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is further applied to assess the confidence on the conclusion.

Photovoltaic (PV) modules convert renewable and sustainable solar energy into electricity. However, the uncertainty of PV power production brings challenges for the grid operation. To facilitate the management and scheduling of PV power plants, forecasting is an essential technique. In this paper, a robust multilayer perception (MLP) neural network was developed for day-ahead forecasting of hourly PV power. A generic MLP is usually trained by minimizing the mean squared loss. The mean squared error is sensitive to a few particularly large errors that can lead to a poor estimator. To tackle the problem, the pseudo-Huber loss function, which combines the best properties of squared loss and absolute loss, was adopted in this paper. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method was verified by benchmarking against a generic MLP network with real PV data. Numerical experiments illustrated that the proposed method performed better than the generic MLP network in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE).