Small-signal modeling and control of the quasi-square-wave boostconverter

Sampled-data techniques are used to examine the dynamic characteristics and closed-loop performance of the quasi-square-wave boost converter. Direct duty-ratio control and current-mode control are considered. With direct duty-ratio control, the system poles remain well damped under all load conditions, and there is no zero in the control-to-output transfer function. Good closed-loop performance is therefore achieved. Under current-mode control, the requirement for a stabilizing ramp is seen to depend on load conditions, and the achievable voltage control-loop bandwidth is smaller than that using direct duty-ratio control; however, there is a significant reduction in the magnitude of the DC source to output-voltage frequency response     

Transcutaneous measurement and spectrum analysis of heart wallvibrations

For the noninvasive diagnosis of heart disease based on the acoustic and elastic characteristics of the heart muscle, it is necessary to transcutaneously measure small vibration signals, including components with an amplitude of less than 100 μm, from various parts of the heart wall continuously for periods of more than several heartbeats in a wide frequency range up to 1 kHz. Such measurement, however, has not been realized by any ultrasonic diagnostic methods or systems to date. By introducing the constraint least-square approach, this paper proposes a new method for accurately tracking the movement of the heart wall based on both the phase and magnitude of the demodulated signal to determine the instantaneous position of the object so that the vibration velocity of the moving object can be accurately estimated. By this method, small vibrations of the heart wall with small amplitudes less than 100 μm on the motion resulting from a heartbeat with large amplitude of 10 mm can be successfully detected with sufficient reproducibility in the frequency range up to several hundred Hertz continuously for periods of about 10 heartbeats. The resultant small vibration is analyzed not only in the time domain, but also in the frequency domain. As confirmed by the preliminary experiments herein reported, the new method offers potential for research in acoustical diagnosis of heart disease     

Fuzzy inference and fuzzy inference processor

Fuzzy inference, a data processing method based on the fuzzy theory that has found wide use in the control field, is reviewed. Consumer electronics, which accounts for most current applications of this concept, does not require very high speeds. Although software running on a conventional microprocessor can perform these inferences, high-speed control applications require much greater speeds. A fuzzy inference date processor that operates at 200000 fuzzy logic inferences per second and features 12-b input and 16-b output resolution is described     

Synthesis and characterization of poly(ethylene aspartate)-metal complexes

Poly(ethylene aspartate) [PEA] was synthesized by the melt condensation of D,L-aspartic acid and ethylene glycol. PEA containing pendent amino and carbonyl groups in its repeating chain was used as the polymeric ligand for complexation with transition metal ions, viz. Co(II), Ni(II), Cu(II), Mn(II), Zn(II), Cd(II), Ca(II), Mg(II), Pb(II) and Hg(II). Complexation was found to be most effective in DMSO. The resulting polyester-metal complexes were solid coloured materials which have been characterized by IR spectroscopy, elemental analysis and magnetic susceptibility measurements. The thermal stability of the polyester-metal complexes was investigated by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). On the basis of the physico-chemical studies, an oxygen and nitrogen coordinated structure for the polyester-metal complexes is proposed.     

Transformed Estimates of Densities of Heavy-Tailed Distributions and Classification

Nonparametric estimation of the density of a heavy-tailed probability distribution is investigated. The initial data are transformed to a bounded interval and the distribution density is determined by an inverse transformation of the distribution density estimate of transformed data. An adaptive data transformation is studied, in which the order of decay of the tail of the true distribution density is preserved and stable estimation of the deviation in tail index estimates is guaranteed. In classification, the empirical risk of erroneous classification by the Bayes empirical classifier is used as a measure for the quality of distribution density estimates.     

The effect of multiple time scales and subexponentiality in MPEGvideo streams on queueing behavior

Guided by the empirical observation that real-time MPEG video streams exhibit both multiple time scale and subexponential characteristics, we construct a video model that captures both of these characteristics and is amenable to queueing analysis. We investigate two fundamental approaches for extracting the model parameters: using sample path and second-order statistics-based methods. The model exhibits the following two canonical queueing behaviors. When strict stability conditions are satisfied, i.e., the conditional mean of each scene is smaller than the capacity of the server, precise modeling of the interscene dynamics (long-term dependency) is not essential for the accurate prediction of small to moderately large queue sizes. In this case, the queue length distribution is determined using quasistationary (perturbation theory) analysis. When weak stability conditions are satisfied, i.e., the conditional mean of at least one scene type is greater than the capacity of the server, the dominant effect for building a large queue size is the subexponential (long-tailed) scene length distribution. In this case, precise modeling of intrascene statistics is of secondary importance for predicting the large queueing behavior. A fluid model, whose arrival process is obtained from the video data by replacing scene statistics with their means, is shown to asymptotically converge to the exact queue distribution. Using the transition scenario of moving from one stability region to the other by a change in the value of the server capacity, we synthesize recent queueing theoretic advances and ad hoc results in video modeling, and unify a broad range of seemingly contradictory experimental observations found in the literature. As a word of caution for the widespread usage of second-order statistics modeling methods, we construct two processes with the same second-order statistics that produce distinctly different queueing behaviors