Robust correlators

Radio frequency interference (RFI) already limits the sensitivity of existing radio telescopes in several frequency bands and may prove to be an even greater obstacle for future generation instruments to overcome. I aim to create a structure of radio astronomy correlators which will be statistically stable (robust) in the presence of interference. A statistical analysis of the mixture of system noise + signal noise + RFI is proposed here which could be incorporated into the block diagram of a correlator. Order and rank statistics are especially useful when calculated in both temporal and frequency domains. Several new algorithms of robust correlators are proposed and investigated here. Computer simulations and processing of real data demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithms

Sampled-data sliding mode observer for robust fault reconstruction: A time-delay approach

A sliding mode observer in the presence of sampled output information and its application to robust fault reconstruction is studied. The observer is designed by using the delayed continuous-time representation of the sampled-data system, for which sufficient conditions are given in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) to guarantee the ultimate boundedness of the error dynamics. Though an ideal sliding motion cannot be achieved in the observer when the outputs are sampled, ultimately bounded solutions can be obtained provided the sampling frequency is fast enough. The bound on the solution is proportional to the sampling interval and the magnitude of the switching gain. The proposed observer design is applied to the problem of fault reconstruction under sampled outputs and system uncertainties. It is shown that actuator or sensor faults can be reconstructed reliably from the output error dynamics. An example of observer design for an inverted pendulum system is used to demonstrate the merit of the proposed methodology compared to existing sliding mode observer design approaches

Giant Cyclones in Gaseous Discs of Spiral Galaxies

We report detection of giant cyclonic vortices in the gaseous disc of the spiral galaxy NGC 3631 in the reference frame rotating with the spiral pattern. A presence of such structures was predicted by the authors for galaxies, where the radial gradient of the perturbed velocity exceeds that of the rotational velocity. This situation really takes place in NGC 3631.Comment: 13 pages, 4 EPS and 3 PS figure