What is "decoupling"

n. The act or process by which something is decoupled. vb. (present participle of decouple English)

Decoupling usually refers to the ending, removal or reverse of coupling.

More specifically, decoupling may refer to:

• Decoupling (advertising), the purchase of services directly from suppliers rather than via an advertising agency.
• Decoupling (cosmology), the transition from close interactions between particles to their effective independence.
• Decoupling (electronics), the prevention of undesired energy transfer between electrical media.
• Decoupling (meteorology), a change in the interaction between atmospheric layers at night.
• Decoupling (neuropsychopharmacology), changes in neurochemical binding sites as a consequence of drug tolerance.
• Decoupling (organizational studies), creating and maintaining separation between policy, implementation and/or practice.
• Decoupling (probability), reduction of a statistic to an average derived from independent random-variable sequences.
• Decoupling (utility regulation), the disassociation of a utility's profits from its sales.

• Decoupling and re-coupling in economics and organizational studies.

• Eco-economic decoupling, economic growth without apparent increase in environmental costs or demands.
• Nuclear magnetic resonance decoupling

• the amelioration of coupling in computer programming.
• the un coupling of railroad/railway carriages or vehicles.

In cosmology, decoupling refers to a period in the development of the universe when different types of particles fall out of thermal equilibrium with each other. This occurs as a result of the expansion of the universe, as their interaction rates decrease (and mean free paths increase) up to this critical point. The two verified instances of decoupling since the Big Bang which are most often discussed are photon decoupling and neutrino decoupling, as these led to the cosmic microwave background and cosmic neutrino background, respectively.

In electronics, decoupling is the prevention of undesired coupling between subsystems.

A common example is connecting localized decoupling capacitors close to the power leads of integrated circuits to suppress coupling via the power supply connections. These act as a small localized energy reservoir that supply the circuit with current during transient, high current demand periods, preventing the voltage on the power supply rail from being pulled down by the momentary current load. Another common example of the use of decoupling capacitors is across the emitter bias resistor of transistor common emitter amplifiers to prevent the resistor absorbing a portion of the AC output power of the amplifier.

Lossy ferrite beads may also be used to isolate or 'island' sections of circuitry. These add a high series impedance (in contrast to the low parallel impedance added by decoupling capacitors) to the power supply rails, preventing high-frequency currents being drawn from elsewhere in the system.

Category:Electronic circuits

In probability and statistics, decoupling is a reduction of a sample statistic to an average of the statistic evaluated on several independent sequences of the random variable. This sum, conditioned on all but one of the independent sequences becomes a sum of independent random variables. Decoupling is used in the study of U statistics, where decoupling should not be confused with Hoeffding's decomposition, however. (Such "decoupling" is unrelated to the use of " couplings" in the study of stochastic processes.)

In weather forecasting, decoupling is boundary-layer decoupling of atmospheric layers over land at night. During the day when the sun shines and warms the land, air at the surface of the earth is heated and rises. This rising air mixes the atmosphere near the earth. At night this process stops and air near the surface cools as the land loses heat by radiating in the infrared. If winds are light, air near the surface of the earth can become much colder, compared to the air above it, than if more mixing of air layers occurred.

In public utility regulation, decoupling refers to the disassociation of a utility's profits from its sales of the energy commodity. Instead, a rate of return is aligned with meeting revenue targets, and rates are adjusted up or down to meet the target at the end of the adjustment period. This makes the utility indifferent to selling less product and improves the ability of energy efficiency and distributed generation to operate within the utility environment.

Ideally, utilities should be rewarded based on how well they meet their customers' energy service needs. However, most current rate designs place the focus on commodity sales instead, tying a distribution company's recovery of fixed costs directly to its commodity sales.

In order to motivate utilities to consider all the options when planning and making resource decisions on how to meet their customers' needs, the sales-revenue link in current rate design must be broken. Breaking that link between the utility's commodity sales and revenues, removes both the incentive to increase electricity sales and the disincentive to run effective energy efficiency programs or invest in other activities that may reduce load. Decision-making then refocuses on making least-cost investments to deliver reliable energy services to customers even when such investments reduce throughput. The result is a better alignment of shareholder and customer interests to provide for more economically and environmentally efficient resource decisions.

As an added benefit, breaking the sales-revenue link streamlines the regulatory process for rate adjustments. Contention over sales forecasts consumes extensive time in every rate case. If the sales-revenue link is broken, these forecasts carry no economic weight, so the incentive to game forecasts of electricity sales is removed and rate cases become less adversarial.

For an in-depth discussion on decoupling see: Revenue Regulation and Decoupling, Lazar, et al., The Regulatory Assistance Project (2011)

While many environmentalists and conservation advocates support decoupling, many consumer advocates representing utility ratepayers have opposed decoupling as it attempts to guarantee revenue levels to utility companies. Decoupling mechanisms reduce a utility company's financial risk from reducing sales, due to conservation, weather and economic conditions. As a result, many consumer advocates have requested and state and federal regulators have required that utility companies profit levels (measured through a return on equity allowance) be reduced to reflect lower risk.

Decoupling, in advertising, occurs when services that were previously subcontracted by advertising agencies are purchased directly from suppliers.

Decoupling is part of the unbundling of the services previously provided by traditional full service advertising agencies, which originally began with the creation of standalone media buying agencies such as Zenith from Saatchi & Saatchi Group in the 1980s and Mindshare from WPP Group in the 1990s. For the same reasons as media (focus, economies of scale and dedicated software) press production and digital production are now increasingly handled by standalone production agencies, which trade direct with advertisers and not through their advertising agencies.

In organizational studies, and particularly new institutional theory, decoupling is the creation and maintenance of gaps between formal policies and actual organizational practices. Organizational researchers have documented decoupling in a variety of organizations, including schools, corporations, government agencies, and social movement organizations. Scholars have proposed a number of explanations for why organizations engage in decoupling. Some researchers have argued that decoupling enables organizations to gain legitimacy with their external members while simultaneously maintaining internal flexibility to address practical considerations. Other scholars have noted that decoupling may occur because it serves the interests of powerful organizational leaders, or because it allows organizational decision-makers to avoid implementing policies that conflict with their ideological beliefs. Recent research has also identified the reverse of decoupling: recoupling, the process whereby "policies and practices that were once decoupled may eventually become coupled."