Occupational Therapy in Hand Rehabilitation

Department of Rehabilitation Science

An improved stability criterion for a class of Lur'e systems

Copyright © 2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.We consider the stability of the feedback connection of a linear time invariant (LTI) plant with a static nonlinearity expressed by a certain class of quadratic program. By generalizing the class of candidate Lyapunov functions we improve on existing results in the literature. A Lyapunov function is constructed via the S-procedure from quadratic constraints established using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. The stability criterion can be expressed as a linear matrix inequality (LMI) condition. We discuss some simple examples that demonstrate the improved results

Comparison of Alcian blue and total carbohydrate assays for quantitation of transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) in biofouling studies

Transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) and their precursors are gel-like acidic polysaccharide particles. Both TEP precursors and TEP have been identified as causal factors in fouling of desalination and water treatment systems. For comparison between studies, it is important to accurately measure the amount and fouling capacity of both components. However, the accuracy and recovery of the currently used Alcian blue based TEP measurement of different surrogates and different size fractions are not well understood. In this study, we compared Alcian blue based TEP measurements with a total carbohydrate assay method. Three surrogates; xanthan gum, pectin and alginic acid; were evaluated at different salinities. Total carbohydrate concentrations of particulates (>0.4 μm) and their precursors (10 kDa) varied depending on water salinity and method of recovery. As xanthan gum is the most frequently used surrogate in fouling studies, TEP concentration is expressed as xanthan gum equivalents (mg XGeq/L) in this study. At a salinity of 35 mg/L sea salt, total carbohydrate assays showed a much higher particulate TEP fraction for alginic acid (38%) compared to xanthan gum (9%) and pectin (12%). The concentrations of particulate TEP therefore may only represent ∼10% of the total mass; while precursor TEP represents ∼80% of the total TEP. This highlights the importance of reporting both particulate and precursor TEP for membrane biofouling studies. The calculated concentrations of TEP and their precursors in seawater samples are also highly dependent on type of surrogate and resulting calibration factor. A linear correlation between TEP recovery and calibration factor was demonstrated in this study for all three surrogates. The relative importance and accuracy of measurement method, particulate size, surrogate type, and recovery are described in detail in this study

Effective Dynamic Range in Measurements with Flash Analog-to-Digital Convertor

Flash Analog to Digital Convertor (FADC) is frequently used in nuclear and particle physics experiments, often as the major component in big multi-channel systems. The large data volume makes the optimization of operating parameters necessary. This article reports a study of a method to extend the dynamic range of an 8-bit FADC from the nominal $\rm{2^8}$ value. By comparing the integrated pulse area with that of a reference profile, good energy reconstruction and event identification can be achieved on saturated events from CsI(Tl) crystal scintillators. The effective dynamic range can be extended by at least 4 more bits. The algorithm is generic and is expected to be applicable to other detector systems with FADC readout.Comment: 19 pages, 1 table, 10 figure

Diffuse export of nutrients under different land uses in the irrigation area of lower Beiyunhe River (China)

AbstractNon-point source pollution is serious in the agriculture watershed of China. Understanding the characteristics of rainfall-runoff from agriculture watershed can provide theoretical support for controlling non-point source pollution. In this study, we investigated runoff characteristics of eight indices (dissolved total N, NO3--N, NH4+-N, total phosphorus, dissolved total phosphorus, particulate phosphorus, total organic carbon, COD) from three types of land uses, including farmland, forest and village in the downstream irrigation area of the Beiyunhe River basin. The results showed that the event mean concentrations (EMCs) of total dissolved N in village, farmland and forestland were 17.81mg/L, 12.68mg/L and 3.14mg/L, respectively. EMC of total phosphorus in the order: farmland (0.44mg/L) > village (0.22mg/L) > forestland (0.17mg/L). EMC of COD in the order: farmland (45.07mg/L) > forestland (27.06mg/L) > village (18.03mg/L). The changes in the nutrients concentrations of the runoff water over a rainfall event indicated that the transports of the nutrients are similar among various land use types. The instantaneous concentrations of TN, NH4+-N, and NO3--N were high in the initial period of runoff, tend to decreasing with rainfall continuing, and increase in later period. Phosphorus concentration with time variation was not obvious among three land use types. The phosphorus species with high proportion in the total phosphorus was particle P (accounting for 75%) in forestland, dissolve P (79%) in farmland, and particle P (48%) and dissolve P (52%) in village. The curves of COD and TOC had been shown as high in the initial period of runoff, tending to increasing with rainfall continuing, and decrease in the later period. First-flush of all the indices were obvious in all three land use types with the rank of village > forestland > farmland. In village, all of the pollutions have taken place the phenomenon of first flush, while in farmland, pollutions tended to uniformly distribute or dilution throughout the storm event

Effect of an External Field on Decoherence

"Decoherence of quantum superpositions through coupling to engineered reservoirs" is the topic of a recent article by Myatt et al. [Nature {\underline{403}}, 269 (2000)] which has attracted much interest because of its relevance to current research in fundamental quantum theory, quantum computation, teleportation, entanglement and the quantum-classical interface. However, the preponderance of theoretical work on decoherence does not consider the effect of an {\underline{external field}}. Here, we present an analysis of such an effect in the case of the random delta-correlated force discussed by Myatt et al

Pulse Shape Discrimination Techniques in Scintillating CsI(Tl) Crystals

There are recent interests with CsI(Tl) scintillating crystals for Dark Matter experiments. The key merit is the capability to differentiate nuclear recoil (nr) signatures from the background $\beta / \gamma$-events due to ambient radioactivity on the basis of their different pulse shapes. One of the major experimental challenges is to perform such pulse shape analysis in the statistics-limited domain where the light output is close to the detection threshold. Using data derived from measurements with low energy $\gamma$'s and nuclear recoils due to neutron elastic scatterings, it was verified that the pulse shapes between $\beta / \gamma$-events are different. Several methods of pulse shape discrimination are studied, and their relative merits are compared. Full digitization of the pulse shapes is crucial to achieve good discrimination. Advanced software techniques with mean time, neural network and likelihood ratios give rise to satisfactory performance, and are superior to the conventional Double Charge method commonly applied at higher energies. Pulse shape discrimination becomes effective starting at a light yield of about 20 photo-electrons. This corresponds to a detection threshold of about 5 keV electron-equivalence energy, or 40$-$50 keV recoil kinetic energy, in realistic experiments.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

Concise stability conditions for systems with static nonlinear feedback expressed by a quadratic program

Copyright © 2008 Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). This paper is a postprint of a paper submitted to and accepted for publication in IET Control Theory and Applications and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is available at IET Digital Library.The stability of the feedback connection of a strictly proper linear time-invariant stable system with a static nonlinearity expressed by a convex quadratic program (QP) is considered. From the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions for the QP, quadratic constraints that may be used with a quadratic Lyapunov function to construct a stability criterion via the S-procedure are established. The approach is based on existing results in the literature, but gives a more parsimonious linear matrix inequality (LMI) criterion and is much easier to implement. This approach can be extended to model predictive control and gives equivalent results to those in the literature but with a much lower dimension LMI criterion

Measurement of the Intrinsic Radiopurity of Cs-137/U-235/U-238/Th-232 in CsI(Tl) Crystal Scintillators

The inorganic crystal scintillator CsI(Tl) has been used for low energy neutrino and Dark Matter experiments, where the intrinsic radiopurity is an issue of major importance. Low-background data were taken with a CsI(Tl) crystal array at the Kuo-Sheng Reactor Neutrino Laboratory. The pulse shape discrimination capabilities of the crystal, as well as the temporal and spatial correlations of the events, provide powerful means of measuring the intrinsic radiopurity of Cs-137 as well as the U-235, U-238 and Th-232 series. The event selection algorithms are described, with which the decay half-lives of Po-218, Po-214, Rn-220, Po-216 and Po-212 were derived. The measurements of the contamination levels, their concentration gradients with the crystal growth axis, and the uniformity among different crystal samples, are reported. The radiopurity in the U-238 and Th-232 series are comparable to those of the best reported in other crystal scintillators. Significant improvements in measurement sensitivities were achieved, similar to those from dedicated massive liquid scintillator detector. This analysis also provides in situ measurements of the detector performance parameters, such as spatial resolution, quenching factors, and data acquisition dead time.Comment: 28 pages, 12 figure

Entangled light in transition through the generation threshold

We investigate continuous variable entangling resources on the base of two-mode squeezing for all operational regimes of a nondegenerate optical parametric oscillator with allowance for quantum noise of arbitrary level. The results for the quadrature variances of a pair of generated modes are obtained by using the exact steady-state solution of Fokker-Planck equation for the complex P-quasiprobability distribution function. We find a simple expression for the squeezed variances in the near-threshold range and conclude that the maximal two-mode squeezing reaches 50% relative to the level of vacuum fluctuations and is achieved at the pump field intensity close to the generation threshold. The distinction between the degree of two-mode squeezing for monostable and bistable operational regimes is cleared up.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; Content changed: more details added to the discussion. To be published in Phys. Rev.