Dynamic analysis of ground steering response of aircraft with electric taxi system

To provide taxi capability without the use of engines or tractor, electric landing gear drive is considered as a potential system add-on. Driving torque and nose wheel steering angle controller are established which are verified by civil aircraft examples. Quasi-steady method is applied to calculate tire forces and moments. The ground steering response of aircraft is simulated, and then different taxi conditions including powered nose wheel mode and powered main wheel mode are compared. Two conclusions are obtained: Electric taxi system helps the aircraft turn on the spot and the turning radius is smaller than the aircraft using engines; differential powered main wheel mode has the minimum turning radius while turning-circle with uniform velocity, and it has smaller difference between two vertical loads of main landing gear than powered nose wheel mode

Analysis of Tumbling Motions by Combining Telemetry Data and Radio Signal

The pointing accuracy and stabilization property of the payload of a satellite depends on performance of attitude determination and control system (ADCS). An essential role of the ADCS is to stabilize the spacecraft in early operation stage and in the presence of anomalies. During this stage, the satellite may be subject to tumbling and a high-reliability method is deemed important to recover the satellite from this stage into its normal operation stage. In the paper, the use of magnetometer data and radio signal characteristics is investigated with the goal of determining the satellite tumbling rate confidently. The proposed method is applied to the PHOENIX CubeSat, which is a CubeSat that is developed by National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan as a part of the QB50 project, at its early orbit stage

Health Numeracy Confidence among Racial/ Ethnica Minorities in HINTS 2007: Sociodemographic, Attitudinal, and Knowledge Correlates

Health numeracy skills help people interpret health risks, and make effective medical decisions. Lower health numeracy confidence was observed for blacks and Hispanic groups than whites. Little is known about the important factors that explain racial differences in health numeracy confidence. For this study, we used a nationally representative, cross-sectional data sample of 4,610 U.S. adults from the National Cancer Institute’s 2007 Health Information National Trends Survey. Bivariate (Chi-squares) and multiple logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify the contribution factors that predict health numeracy confidence.Non-linear Fairlie decompositions were used to quantify the factor contributions to racial differences in health numeracy confidence. The priority rankings of the important factors to explain the health numeracy confidence racial and ethnic disparities are different depending on the particular racial and ethnic group. Diverse, culturally appropriate approaches are needed to improve numeracy confidence for specific racial and ethnic groups

Complex roles ankyrin-1 plays in malaria infections

Despite the numerous interventions employed in the past few decades, malaria remains one of the most lethal diseases affecting millions of people worldwide. This is partly due to the emergence of resistance to the current parasite-targeted antimalarials. In contrast, erythrocytic genetic mutations have been conferring malaria protection in humans for thousands of years without losing their effectiveness. This presents a new therapeutic approach to mimic these genetic mutations to treat malaria, known as host-directed therapy (HDT), which requires further understanding of host-parasite interactions to identify potential HDT drug targets. One such HDT target is the erythrocytic cytoskeleton, which parasites rely on for their survival. Ankyrin-1 (Ank-1) is one of erythrocytic cytoskeleton proteins, which has been associated with hereditary spherocytosis (HS) in humans. This thesis investigates the roles of Ank-1 in malaria infections using mouse models and blood from HS patients. Mice with Ank-1 mutations were found to exhibit phenotypes similar to human HS patients and are protected against malaria via multiple mechanisms, suggesting that Ank-1 plays a complex role in malaria infections. These mechanisms are heavily influenced by the nature of Ank-1 mutations, which is further confirmed in human HS erythrocytes. This thesis also explores the possibility of using the ankyrin-spectrin interaction as a HDT target. Results show that the disruption of this interaction has little effect on the health of the mice, while conferring significant resistance towards malaria, thus enabling the use of high throughput screening (HTS) for drug discovery. To summarise, this thesis highlights the complex interactions between the erythrocyte cytoskeleton and malarial parasites, as well as providing insights into the heterogeneous protective role of Ank-1 in mediating malaria resistance. It also raises the possibility of using erythrocytic cytoskeletal proteins as HDT drug targets, which could potentially yield novel therapies for malaria in the future