The demand for power converters is on the rise due to their ability to achieve high power conversion efficiency, small size, light weight and reduced cost. DC-DC converters are used in many applications where, the output voltage needs to be regulated for wide variations in the input voltage and the load. They are also used in applications where electrical isolation is required. Power generation from renewable energy sources suffers from highly fluctuating output voltages. Electrical isolation of renewable energy sources from the grid is essential. Therefore, DC-DC converters are used as an integral part of the power electronic interface required for grid integration of renewable energy sources such as wave energy power conversion. In this dissertation as a first step, the power converters used in wave energy applications are classified and compared. Analysis, design, simulation and experimental results of fixed frequency controlled HF transformer isolated DC-DC resonant converters are presented. The first converter topology presented in Chapter 3 is a ‘fixed frequency controlled single-phase high frequency (HF) transformer isolated DC-DC LCL-type series resonant converter (SRC) with capacitive output filter using a modified gating scheme’. Working of this converter has been explained. Modeling and steady-state analysis of the converter using approximate complex ac circuit analysis method has been done. Various design curves have been obtained. A step-by-step design procedure has been illustrated with an example of a 200 W converter. PSIM simulation results for different operating conditions are presented. Experimental model of the designed converter has been built and the test results are given. Power loss breakdown analysis of the converter has been made. Zero-voltage switching (ZVS) is achieved for different input voltages, and load. This converter cell can be used in interleaved operation to realize higher power converters. The second topology presented in Chapter 4 is ‘a fixed-frequency controlled, 3-phase HF transformer isolated, integrated boost dual 3-phase bridge DC-DC LCL-type SRC with capacitive output filter’. Detailed modeling of the boost section and one of the two identical 3-phase inverter modules is presented. Analysis of the inverter module using approximate complex ac circuit analysis method is presented. Various design curves have been obtained. A step-by-step design procedure has been illustrated with an example of a 600 W converter. Detailed PSIM simulation results for different operating conditions are presented. Experimental model of the designed converter has been built and the test results are given. Power loss breakdown analysis has been made. Major advantage of this converter has been its ability to regulate the output voltage for wide variations in the input voltage and load, while maintaining ZVS for all the switches. Also, due to the parallel connection of the inverter modules the component stresses are significantly reduced. This encourages the converter to be used in high power applications such as wave energy. A 10 kW DC-DC converter cell of the second topology mentioned above has been designed to illustrate the design and working of a high power converter. Performance of the designed converter has been verified by PSIM simulations. This converter operates with ZVS for all the switches for a wide variation in the input voltage and the loading conditions. Power loss breakdown analysis has been performed. / Graduate

Neurological and neuroendocrine disorders result from signaling dysregulation at the molecular, cellular, and multi-cellular levels. This dissertation presents the development of separation methods, using capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) and capillary liquid chromatography (CLC), for detecting and quantifying small molecules, peptides, and proteins involved in cellular signaling. CZE is a rapid separation technique, making it ideal for monitoring cellular dynamics with high temporal resolution. An ultraviolet - light emitting diode was used for photolytic optical gating of caged fluorophore-labeled biogenic amines, common functional groups in neurotransmitters. Additionally, a novel caged fluorophore with faster reaction kinetics than commercially available dyes was used to label reduced thiols and primary amines in the presence of o-phthalaldehyde. Together this light source and novel caged dye illustrate the utility of these methods for monitoring chemical dynamics during continuous sampling. Many cellular second messengers, including inositol phosphates, are known to exist within the cell, but their dynamics and intermolecular interactions are poorly understood since they lack chromophores or electroactive functional groups making direct detection difficult. Utilizing CZE with capacitive coupled contactless conductivity detection (C4D), biological phosphates were separated and detected based on their high anionic charge, suggesting the utility of C4D in label-free detection of biological molecules. The techniques described above require higher sensitivity to monitor physiologically relevant analyte concentrations; therefore, Hadamard transform capillary electrophoresis (HTCE) was used as a multiplexing method in which multiple separations were performed simultaneously. HTCE resulted in increased sensitivity by decreasing the random background noise. Peptides and proteins propagate signals within or between cells; yet, they are difficult to separate and detect by CZE since their highly charged surfaces result in non-specific adsorption to the capillary wall. To minimize these interactions, stable hybrid phospholipid bilayers were prepared as capillary coatings for CZE separations of cationic proteins. Additionally, stabilized phospholipid bilayer coatings were formed on silica particles through redox polymerization of synthetic, polymerizable lipids. These bilayers were stable after exposure to surfactant, organic solvents, and after storage for one month, suggesting their value as lipid chromatography stationary phases for future incorporation of transmembrane proteins to analyze binding interactions with small molecules.

Imaging tools in cellular and molecular biology have long relied on organic fluorophores to observe microorganisms or various cell constituents. The advent of semiconductor nanoparticles known as quantum dots (QDs) has offered the possibility to use this new class of fluorescent probes with very advantageous optical properties in cell biology. The imaging of transmembrane potential and ionic currents is of significant importance for monitoring the activity of the cell. It remains possible with relatively complicated instruments and methods such as patch clamping. A complementary approach to view the dynamics of ion channels with modern and efficient fluorophores is therefore of great interest to the field of biology in general. / We developed a construct based on the FRET signal between QDs and organic fluorescent dyes to monitor the conformational changes of voltage gated sodium channels. The amino acid histidine was used as a "landing platform" for QDs and the bacterial sodium channel NaChBac was chosen for testing. This study focused on the preliminary steps of the project and aimed to characterize the electrophysiological behavior of the histidine-tagged channel. The whole-cell configuration of patch clamping was the tool we used to understand the differences between the wild-type and the histidine-tagged variants of the channels. We also explore the possibility to land QDs on the histidine tag.

Power consumption is one of the most important design factors in modern electronic design. With a large market increase in portable battery-operated devices and push for environmental focus, it is of interest for the industry to decrease the power consumption of modern chips as much as possible. However, as circuits scale down in size the leakage current increases. This increases the static power consumption, and in future technologies the static power is expected to make up most of the overall power consumption. Power gating can decrease static power by isolating a circuit block from the power supply. In large chips, this requires state-retention flip flops and non-volatile memories in order to keep the circuit functioning continuously between power gating sequences. A design concept utilizing this is a Normally Off computer, which is in an off-state with no static power for the majority of the time. This is achieved by using non-volatile logic and memories. This concept has been realized by using a new semiconductor technology developed at Semiconductor Energy Laboratories Corporation Ltd., which is known as crystalline In-Ga-Zn oxide semiconductor material. This technology realizes transistors with an ultra-low off-state current, and enables several novel designs of state-retention circuits suitable for Normally-Off computers. This thesis presents two different architectures of state retention flip flops utilizing In-Ga-Zn oxide semiconductor transistors, which are produced and compared to determine their tradeoffs and effectiveness. These flip flops are then implemented in a 32-bit Normally-Off microprocessor to determine the performance of each implementation. This is evaluated by calculating the energy break-even time, which is the power gating time required to overcome the power overhead introduced by the state-retention flip flops. The resulting circuits and the work in this thesis has been presented at two conferences and submitted for publication in one scientific journal.

Teachers report that there are an increased number of students engaging in persistent antisocial behaviour in their classrooms. Teachers need to identify these students early because if there is early identification then there is the potential for early intervention, which in turn may prevent negative long-term outcomes for these students as well as long-term costs to society. The aims of this study were (1) develop a psychometrically sound, cost effective, three-step multiple gating behaviour screening procedure that teachers could use in their kindergarten/classroom so that they could identify those students at-risk of antisocial development, (2) examine if the third gate of this procedure was necessary for the accurate identification of these students, and (3) could such a screening procedure be adapted for classroom teacher use in New Zealand kindergartens and schools. Forty eight teachers from three kindergartens and 10 primary/intermediate schools volunteered for the study, of which 34 teachers completed all three gates of the screening procedure. Results indicate the three gate screening procedure was easily adapted for kindergarten and classroom use with, at Gate 3, teachers’ self-recording 30 direct observations of a nominated and control student during their normal teaching lesson with good accuracy. All three gates were effective in identifying those students at-risk of antisocial development but Gates 1 and 2 were the most effective in terms of accuracy, time and resourcing. The teachers found the three gate procedure manageable, required very little training and did not interrupt classroom routine or schedules. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Coronary magnetic resonance angiography (CMRA) is a potential diagnostic tool for coronary artery disease (CAD). Compared to the current gold standard, x-ray angiography, CMRA provides three-dimensional visualization of coronary vessel lumens without the use of catheters and ionizing radiation. CMRA, however, requires long acquisition times that span multiple heartbeats. Typically, to reduce cardiac motion artifacts, electrocardiogram (ECG) gating is used to synchronize data acquisition windows to diastasis periods. Gating errors may cause vessel blurring by unintentionally triggering the scanner to acquire image data during periods of significant cardiac motion. This is particularly problematic for CMRA because of the associated fine spatial resolution requirement for diagnosing CAD. This thesis presents and tests the novel idea of determining the timing of global epicardial diastasis periods from the motion of the basal ventricular septum. An experiment involving a small patient cohort undergoing elective diagnostic angiography revealed a significant correlation between the beat-to-beat diastasis periods of the ventricular septum and the coronary vasculature. This motivated the ii development and testing of the hypothesis that suggests sharper coronary artery images may be obtained by using cardiac gating windows determined by septal motion. A preliminary study involving a small volunteer cohort provided encouraging results, but also revealed limitations of using ultrasound to measure septal motion during a pre- scan prior to an MRA exam. This led to the major technical development of this thesis, which is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method called the Septal Scout for monitoring septal motion at a very high temporal resolution. The technique was applied to a volunteer cohort which showed that cardiac gating windows as determined by the Septal Scout provided sharper coronary images compared with conventional ECG gating. The scientific knowledge and technical developments presented in this thesis are intended to improve CMRA as a non-invasive diagnostic tool of CAD. In the future, I intend to integrate the concepts presented here into a functioning MRI-based cardiac gating system. As well, I intend to validate the Septal Scout in a patient cohort study.

The successful fabrication and characterization of two chemiresistive platforms for biomolecule detection was demonstrated by this work. The Si/Silica based single walled nanotube thin film (SWNTTF) platform was developed to understand the effect of device geometry on pH and M13 bacteriophage sensing capabilities as well as the underlying mechanisms governing SWNTTF chemiresistive biosensors. The dominant mechanism of sensing switched from direct chemical doping to electrostatic gating when the target analyte changed from H+/OH- ions in pH testing to whole viruses. The experimental limit of detection for M13 for this platform was 0.5pM and an increased sensitivity as well as variability was observed in devices with smaller channel widths. Preliminary device calibration was completed in order to correlate a resistance response to a bulk M13 concentration. The polyethylene terephthalate (PET) based SWNTTF platform was developed to demonstrate the commercial potential of SWNTTF chemiresistive biosensors by detecting relevant concentrations of brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) on economically viable substrates. The pH response of these chemiresistors confirmed that chemical doping was the cause for resistance change in the SWNTTFs. The preliminary results demonstrated successful BNP detection at 50pg/mL using both aptamers and antibodies as recognition elements. Using SWNTTFs as the transducing element of chemiresistors allowed for further understanding of electrical mechanisms of sensing as well as achieving sensitive, real-time and reproducible electrical virus and biomolecule detection. Although these platforms do not achieve ultrasensitive limits of detection, they demonstrate the commercial potential of platforms using SWNTTFs as the transducing element of electrical biomolecule sensors.

The research reported in this thesis examines the relative contributions of top-down and bottom-up information during lexical access. I evaluate the Cohort Model of lexical access (Marslen-Wilson and Welsh, 1978; Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1980; and Marslen-Wilson, 1987) which specifies that the first stage in lexical access is fully autonomous and that during this stage all processing proceeds in terms of analysis of the acoustic-phonetic input. Implicit in this model is the assumption that bottom-up processing is immune to any effects of contextual or top-down information. I examine the extent to which listeners ever rely exclusively on bottom-up information during lexical access and investigate this issue empirically, by measuring effects of context on both the production and the perception of words in various contexts. I test the hypothesis that a word uttered in a constraining context will be acoustically indistinguishable from its competitors by, first, measuring one acoustic parameter (VOT) across constraining and non-constraining contexts and, then, examining the intelligibility of tokens of that parameter taken from the varyingly constraining contexts. The data from these experiments suggest that the realization of VOT is not an aspect of bottom-up information which would create problems for a bottom-up processor in terms of providing ambiguous acoustic-phonetic information. I then investigate whether bottom-up processing during lexical access is immune to effects of context. Following Grosjean (1980) and Tyler (1984), I utilize the Gating Paradigm. Using incongruous contexts, I argue that direct assessment of the contributions made by different information sources during lexical access can be made. By presenting bottom-up information which is inappropriate to the contextual (topdown) information, I evaluate the extent to which one information source is given priority over the other. I vary both the contextual constraints available to the listener and the acoustic clarity of bottom-up information. The observed pattern of listeners' identifications of the words suggested that whilst bottomup information was given priority, top-down information was available and was utilized during lexical access. I present data which support the working structure of the Cohort Model of lexical access. I conclude, however, that the model places disproportionate emphasis on initial bottom-up processing. It appears that top-down information is not prohibited from contributing to processing during the initial stage of lexical access.

In radiation therapy, a treatment plan is designed to make the delivery of radiation to a target more accurate, effective, and less damaging to surrounding healthy tissues. In lung sites, the tumor is affected by the patient’s respiratory motion. Despite tumor motion, current practice still uses a static delivery plan. Unexpected changes due to coughs and sneezes are not taken into account and as a result, the tumor is not treated accurately and healthy tissues are damaged. In this thesis we detail a framework of using an accelerometer device to detect and forecast coughs. The accelerometer measurements are modeled as a ARMA process to make forecasts. We draw from studies in cough physiology and use amplitudes and durations of the forecasted breathing cycles as features to estimate parameters of Gaussian Mixture Models for cough and normal breathing classes. The system was tested on 10 volunteers, where each data set consisted of one 3-5 minute accelerometer measurements to train the system, and two 1-3 minute accelerometer measurements for testing.

Phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PC-MRI) can provide a complement to echocardiography for the evaluation of the fetal heart. Cardiac imaging typically requires gating with peripheral hardware; however, a gating signal is not readily available in utero. In this thesis, I present a technique for reconstructing time-resolved fetal phase-contrast MRI in spite of this limitation. Metric Optimized Gating (MOG) involves acquiring data without gating and retrospectively determining the proper reconstruction by optimizing an image metric, and the research in this thesis describes the theory, implementation, and evaluation of this technique. In particular, results from an experiment with a pulsatile flow phantom, an adult volunteer study, in vivo application in the fetal population, and numerical simulations are presented for validation. MOG enables imaging with conventional PC-MRI sequences in the absence of a gating signal, permitting flow measurements in the great vessels in utero.