In conjunction with the third regional Southeast Asian (SEA) therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 25 clinicians and researchers from SEA and South Asian countries attended the inaugural strategy meeting for the establishment of a regional TPE consortium for neurological disorders. The primary objective was to establish regional collaboration to improve delivery of TPE services in SEA. A pre‐meeting survey was conducted to gather insights on disease spectrum, contextual practice challenges, and the need for a regional TPE consensus. Challenges identified include limited healthcare funding in support of diagnostic workup, TPE therapy, as well as development of clinical infrastructure and expertise capacity building. There was favorable interest in developing a working plan contextualized to this region. Strategies to overcome challenges were discussed. This included the need for a comprehensive referral system and network of regional TPE centers suited to local needs, supported by innovative TPE delivery programs.

Electrical power demand is increasing cumulatively with the increase in population. Economic and environmental impacts restrict the expansion of conventional generation but prompting for intermittent wind sources due to its economic and environmental benefits. But the average capacity value of the wind power is not the same as that of the same rated conventional generation due to its intermittent nature and wind speed dependence. Several definitions of capacity value of wind power are proposed on the basis of reliability evaluation of the system. The estimation of capacity value is not easy as at hourly step wind speed is changing so the power. Therefore, a new procedure is developed here to accumulate all the information like the sequential value of wind power, their reliability indices, and the corresponding capacity values using the capacity value definitions in a single database. To search the capacity value of the wind power, the database is represented in a multidimensional k-dimensional tree and nearest neighbor search algorithm is implemented. A case study is considered to validate the proposed methodology.

In this paper, impacts of renewable sources on the adequacy of a 2 area system are presented. Integration of popular renewable sources like photovoltaic (PV) and wind is forcing the operational planner to operate differently. Here, an effort has been made to propose some planning scenarios for 2 area system on the basis of renewable sources integration, and reliability is evaluated corresponding to each scenario. Loss of load expectation is popular method for adequacy assessment following 2 state principle (available or unavailable) of conventional sources. Photovoltaic and wind system never follow 2 state principle unlike conventional. Existing PV module configuration determine the unavailability rate of PV plant considering component failure. Random wind speed is simulated using time series auto regressive moving average model. Wind turbine characteristics and simulated wind speed create multistate wind energy conversion system and reduced by apportioning method to predict unavailability rate. A simple 2 area system is considered to validate the efficacy of proposed theme.

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Purpose This study aims to propose a modified topology for an asymmetric multilevel inverter as a basic module that generates 13-level output voltage waveform. The basic module consists of eight switches (unidirectional and bidirectional switch) and four DC voltage sources with unequal magnitudes. The proposed topology reduces the number of switches, isolated DC sources, cost and size of the circuit significantly as compared to other topologies. In addition, the proposed circuit provides a modular structure for a multilevel inverter. Design/methodology/approach The proposed configuration is implemented through simulation and hardware development of a single-phase 13-level inverter prototype. A multicarrier-based pulse width modulation scheme is adopted for generating switching signals by using dSPACE real-time controller. Findings To demonstrate the advantages of the proposed configuration, a comparative analysis is carried out with other multilevel topologies in terms of number of switches, gate driver circuits, on-state switches and blocking voltage on the switches. The comparison results confirmed that the proposed configuration requires less number of components for the same number of voltage levels. Moreover, the peak inverse voltage on switches and losses is lower in the proposed configuration. Originality/value In the available literature, numerous topologies are presented with main emphasis on the reduced components count. In this study, the authors proposed a new topology for an asymmetrical source configuration. The performance of the proposed topology under steady-state and dynamic conditions is evaluated using simulation and experimental implementation.