Adaptive Control for Estimating Insulation Resistance of High- Voltage Battery System in Electric Vehicles

To ensure electrical safety and reliability in electric vehicles equipped with a high-voltage battery pack, an insulation monitoring circuit is indispensable to continuously monitor the insulation resistance during charging or driving. Existing methods such as injecting specific signals into the monitoring circuit and earth help to extract the resistance value from the voltage waveform. However, parasitic or stray capacitances in the monitoring circuit, which might introduce higher order dynamics into the waveform, are ignored. To avoid estimation error, the insulation resistance must be known in advance to carry out parameter calibration. In this chapter, one parasitic capacitance is applied in the circuit model and a new adaptive algorithm based on Lyapunov stability is employed to estimate the insulation resistance. This new online monitoring method and circuit are verified through simulation and experimentation, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can quickly react and track variations of insulation resistance on both positive and negative direct current (DC) lines

Reused Lithium-Ion Battery Applied in Water Treatment Plants

For stabilizing renewable energies and shaving peak power at noon, both the energy consumption and potential renewable energies in Dihua waste water treatment plant (WWTP) in Taiwan are analyzed. Under the consideration of environment, cost, and performance, automotive reused lithium-ion battery (RLIB) is employed. Two typical automotive lithium-ion batteries are used in this study after the selection of suitable battery cells. In particular, one simple, converterless energy management system (EMS) is developed and integrated in new RLIB packs. The control strategy between RLIB and an additional physical battery is adjusted by simulation. An online estimation of RLIB’s internal resistance and open-circuit voltage monitoring scheme is applied in EMS to ensure the safety of RLIB. The bench test and rough economical estimation reveal that EMS shows great potential in elongating life cycle and possibly benefits from feed-in tariff and peak shift of electricity charges

BIOMECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF HIGH-LOW IMPACT AEROBIC DANCE AND STEP AEROBICS

The purpose of this study was to compare the kinematics and kinetics both in high-Iow impact aerobic dance and step aerobics. Six female subjects performed front knee lift movements under high-Iow impact aerobics and two-step heights (10, 20 cm) in step aerobics. One Peak high-speed camera (120 Hz) and one Kistler force plate (600 Hz) were synchronized to collect the data. An ANOVA for repeated measures was used to identify differences for each dependent variable. The result indicated that it is important to flex at the knee and ankle joints in order to absorb and reduce the shock in the landing phase. When compared to the low impact front knee lift, high impact front knee lift and two-step heights of step aerobics had significant shorter time to first peak impact force and higher values for first peak impact force, passive impact impulse, and total work

Biomolecular Events in Cancer Revealed by Attractor Metagenes

Mining gene expression profiles has proven valuable for identifying signatures serving as surrogates of cancer phenotypes. However, the similarities of such signatures across different cancer types have not been strong enough to conclude that they represent a universal biological mechanism shared among multiple cancer types. Here we present a computational method for generating signatures using an iterative process that converges to one of several precise attractors defining signatures representing biomolecular events, such as cell transdifferentiation or the presence of an amplicon. By analyzing rich gene expression datasets from different cancer types, we identified several such biomolecular events, some of which are universally present in all tested cancer types in nearly identical form. Although the method is unsupervised, we show that it often leads to attractors with strong phenotypic associations. We present several such multi-cancer attractors, focusing on three that are prominent and sharply defined in all cases: a mesenchymal transition attractor strongly associated with tumor stage, a mitotic chromosomal instability attractor strongly associated with tumor grade, and a lymphocyte-specific attractor

Correlation of Copper Interaction, Copper-Driven Aggregation, and Copper-Driven H2O2 Formation with Aβ40 Conformation

The neurotoxicity of Aβ is associated with the formation of free radical by interacting with redox active metals such as Cu2+. However, the relationship between ion-interaction, ion-driven free radical formation, and Aβ conformation remains to be further elucidated. In the present study, we investigated the correlation of Cu2+ interaction and Cu2+-driven free radical formation with Aβ40 conformation. The Cu2+-binding affinity for Aβ40 in random coiled form is 3-fold higher than that in stable helical form. Unexpectedly but interestingly, we demonstrate in the first time that the stable helical form of Aβ40 can induce the formation of H2O2 by interacting with Cu2+. On the other hand, the H2O2 generation is repressed at Aβ/Cu2+ molar ratio ≥1 when Aβ40 adopts random coiled structure. Taken together, our result demonstrates that Aβ40 adopted a helical structure that may play a key factor for the formation of free radical with Cu2+ ions

Oromotor variability in children with mild spastic cerebral palsy: a kinematic study of speech motor control

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Treating motor speech dysfunction in children with CP requires an understanding of the mechanism underlying speech motor control. However, there is a lack of literature in quantitative measures of motor control, which may potentially characterize the nature of the speech impairments in these children. This study investigated speech motor control in children with cerebral palsy (CP) using kinematic analysis.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We collected 10 children with mild spastic CP, aged 4.8 to 7.5 years, and 10 age-matched children with typical development (TD) from rehabilitation department at a tertiary hospital. All children underwent analysis of percentage of consonants correct (PCC) and kinematic analysis of speech tasks: poly-syllable (PS) and mono-syllable (MS) tasks using the Vicon Motion 370 system integrated with a digital camcorder. Kinematic parameters included spatiotemporal indexes (STIs), and average values and coefficients of variation (CVs) of utterance duration, peak oral opening displacement and velocity. An ANOVA was conducted to determine whether PCC and kinematic data significantly differed between groups.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>CP group had relatively lower PCCs (80.0-99.0%) than TD group (<it>p </it>= 0.039). CP group had higher STIs in PS speech tasks, but not in MS tasks, than TD group did (<it>p </it>= 0.001). The CVs of utterance duration for MS and PS tasks of children with CP were at least three times as large as those of TD children (<it>p </it>< 0.01). However, average values of utterance duration, peak oral opening displacement and velocity and CVs of other kinematic data for both tasks did not significantly differ between two groups.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>High STI values and high variability on utterance durations in children with CP reflect deficits in relative spatial and/or especially temporal control for speech in the CP participants compared to the TD participants. Children with mild spastic CP may have more difficulty in processing increased articulatory demands and resulted in greater oromotor variability than normal children. The kinematic data such as STIs can be used as indices for detection of speech motor control impairments in children with mild CP and assessment of the effectiveness in the treatment.</p