This thesis presents and analyses new techniques to measure and track the phase and frequency of high frequency narrow bandwidth signals. In particular, these techniques are all digital in nature or can be implemented in digital integrated circuit technology.Presented first is a frequency measurement technique which involves sampling at regular intervals a binary quantized narrow band signal. The binary quantized samples are digitally processed to obtain the instantaneous frequency of the signal.It is shown that small phase movements in the signal can be detected even though the sampling occurs at a rate much lower than the signal frequency; that there are no frequency offsets in the frequency measurement technique; that the phase error in the technique is small and bounded provided the signal frequency is maintained within derived limits. Other properties of the technique are also derived.The frequency measurement technique is experimentally demonstrated in a number of typical applications.Secondly, a new phase tracking system is presented, which has similarities to conventional phase locked loops. However, unlike phase locked loops, the new system incorporates a local reference source which effectively stabilizes the phase estimate of the signal input being tracked.It is shown that the new system has the following advantages: Precise centre frequency, controllable lock range, and elimination or reduction of the effects of imperfections like voltage controlled oscillator phase noise. General behaviour in noise of the new phase tracking system is derived.An implementation of the new system is presented which employs the frequency measurement technique described above. This implementation is characterized by very precise centre frequency, high phase noise suppression, and can be built almost entirely in digital integrated circuit technology. The new system is ++ / experimentally demonstrated in some typical applications.The techniques presented in this thesis provide improvements of several orders of magnitude in the ability of systems implemented in digital integrated circuit technology to: Measure and control phase and frequency of narrow band signals; Implement high performance phase tracking systems.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / A parallel multi-channel receiver for binary phase shift keyed (BPSK) direct-sequence (DS) spread-spectrum (SS) is introduced in this paper. It adopts a Costas carrier frequency-tracking loop which maintains frequency lock rather than phase lock, and the delay-lock error can be noncoherently obtained to track the PN code. For airborne applications, this method will extend effectively the receiver’s tracking dynamics range for the carrier Doppler shift. A erasable programmable logic device (EPLD) is applied to get the advantage of smaller size and higher flexibility. A high speed microprocessor (TMS320C30) which acts as the processing unit of the receiver is used for acquiring and tracking of the carrier and PN code by digital signal processing algorithms. This receiver is more flexible and is easily improved by reconfiguring the EPLD and modifying the software algorithms. Its fundamental principle is described in the paper.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Psychological Sciences / Gary L. Brase / Operational Sex Ratio (OSR: the ratio of reproductively viable males to females in a given population) has been theorized and studied as a construct that may influence behaviors. The encoding of sex ratio was examined in order to determine whether the cognitive process underlying it is automatic or effortful. Further, the current work examines whether OSR or Adult Sex Ratio (ASR: the ratio of adult males to females) is encoded. The current work involved four experiments; two using frequency tracking methodology and two using summary statistic methodology. Experiment 1 found a strong correlation between OSR of conditions and estimates of sex ratio. Participants in Experiment 1 were uninformed on the purpose of the experiment, thus the strong correlations between actual and estimated sex ratio suggest a level of automaticity. Experiment 2 found a strong correlation between the ASR of conditions and estimates, suggesting that individuals do not encode OSR over ASR. Experiments 3.a. and 3.b. demonstrated automaticity in estimates of sex ratio from briefly presented sets of faces, for two different durations: 1000ms and 330ms, the later of which is widely accepted as the length of a single eye fixation. Overall this work demonstrated a human ability to recall proportion of sexes from arrays of serially presented individuals (Experiments 1 and 2), and that ASR is encoded when participants are presented with conditions including older adults. This work found the encoding of sex ratio to be highly automatic, particularly stemming from the results of Experiments 3.a. and 3.b. Conclusions from this work help to verify previous research on sex ratio’s effect on mating strategies through evidence supporting the automatic nature of encoding sex ratio. Further, the current work is a foundation for future research regarding sex ratio, and leads to several proposals for future endeavors.

System stability plays an important role in electric power systems. With the development of electric power system, the scale of the electric grid is now becoming larger and larger, and many renewable energy resources are integrated in the grid. However, at the same time, the stability and safety issues of electric power system are becoming more complicated. Frequency and phasors are two critical parameters of the system stability. Obtaining these two parameters have been great challenges for decades. Researchers have provided various kinds of algorithms for frequency tracking and phasor estimation. Among them, Least Squares (LS) algorithm is one of the most commonly used algorithm. This thesis studies the LS algorithm and the Total Least Squares (TLS) algorithm working on frequency tracking and phasor estimation. In order to test the performance of the two algorithms, some simulations have been made in the Matlab. The Total Vector Error (TVE) is a commonly used performance criteria, and the TVE results of the two algorithms are compared. The TLS algorithm performs better than LS algorithm when the frequencies of all harmonic components are given.

The digitization of classical control systems presents a number of challenges and opportunities with respect to the miniaturization, distribution, reliability verification and obsolescence of both the controller and the underlying system under control. A method for the design of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) compensators realized in the form of all-digital components is presented. All-digital refers to a system implementation that is realizable with a wide range of digital logic components including discrete digital logic elements and programmable logic devices (PLDs) such as field-programmable gate arrays. The proportional, integral and derivative components of the classical PID control law were re-envisioned in terms of frequency of occurrences or counts for adaptation to combinatorial and sequential digital logic. Modification of the control scheme around this newly formed representation of system error enables the development of a PID-like FPGA-based or PLD-based controller. Details of the design of an all-digital PID-like controller including abstract, causal block diagrams and a MATLAB® and Simulink® based implementation are presented. The compensator was simulated in a velocity tracking DC motor control application and was found to perform comparably to that of a classical PID based control. Methods for assessing the resultant stability of an all-digital PID compensated system under control are discussed.

Rotordynamic instability can be disastrous for the operation of high speed turbomachinery in the industry. Most ??instabilities?? are due to de-stabilizing cross coupled forces from variable fluid dynamic pressure around a rotor component, acting in the direction of the forward whirl and causing subsynchronous orbiting of the rotor. However, all subsynchronous whirling is not unstable and methods to diagnose the potentially unstable kind are critical to the health of the rotor-bearing system. The objective of this thesis is to explore means of diagnosing whether subsynchronous vibrations are benign or have the potential to become unstable. Several methods will be detailed to draw lines of demarcation between the two. Considerable focus of the research has been on subharmonic vibrations induced from non-linear bearing stiffness and the study of vibration signals typical to such cases. An analytical model of a short-rigid rotor with stiffness non-linearity is used for numerical simulations and the results are verified with actual experiments. Orbits filtered at the subsynchronous frequency are shown as a diagnostic tool to indicate benign vibrations as well as ??frequency tracking?? and agreement of the frequency with known eigenvalues. Several test rigs are utilized to practically demonstrate the above conclusions. A remarkable finding has been the possibility of diagnosing instability using the synchronous phase angle. The synchronous phase angle ?? is the angle by which the unbalance vector leads the vibration vector. Experiments have proved that ?? changes appreciably when there is a de-stabilizing cross coupled force acting on the rotor as compared to when there is none. A special technique to calculate the change in ?? with cross-coupling is outlined along with empirical results to exemplify the case. Subsequently, a correlation between the synchronous phase angle and the phase angle measured with most industrial balancing instruments is derived so that the actual measurement of the true phase angle is not a necessity for diagnosis. Requirements of advanced signal analysis techniques have led to the development of an extremely powerful rotordynamic measurement teststand ?? ??LVTRC??. The software was developed in tandem with this thesis project. It is a stand-alone application that can be used for field measurements and analysis by turbomachinery companies.

Rotordynamic instability can be disastrous for the operation of high speed turbomachinery in the industry. Most ??instabilities?? are due to de-stabilizing cross coupled forces from variable fluid dynamic pressure around a rotor component, acting in the direction of the forward whirl and causing subsynchronous orbiting of the rotor. However, all subsynchronous whirling is not unstable and methods to diagnose the potentially unstable kind are critical to the health of the rotor-bearing system. The objective of this thesis is to explore means of diagnosing whether subsynchronous vibrations are benign or have the potential to become unstable. Several methods will be detailed to draw lines of demarcation between the two. Considerable focus of the research has been on subharmonic vibrations induced from non-linear bearing stiffness and the study of vibration signals typical to such cases. An analytical model of a short-rigid rotor with stiffness non-linearity is used for numerical simulations and the results are verified with actual experiments. Orbits filtered at the subsynchronous frequency are shown as a diagnostic tool to indicate benign vibrations as well as ??frequency tracking?? and agreement of the frequency with known eigenvalues. Several test rigs are utilized to practically demonstrate the above conclusions. A remarkable finding has been the possibility of diagnosing instability using the synchronous phase angle. The synchronous phase angle ?? is the angle by which the unbalance vector leads the vibration vector. Experiments have proved that ?? changes appreciably when there is a de-stabilizing cross coupled force acting on the rotor as compared to when there is none. A special technique to calculate the change in ?? with cross-coupling is outlined along with empirical results to exemplify the case. Subsequently, a correlation between the synchronous phase angle and the phase angle measured with most industrial balancing instruments is derived so that the actual measurement of the true phase angle is not a necessity for diagnosis. Requirements of advanced signal analysis techniques have led to the development of an extremely powerful rotordynamic measurement teststand ?? ??LVTRC??. The software was developed in tandem with this thesis project. It is a stand-alone application that can be used for field measurements and analysis by turbomachinery companies.

La surveillance automatique consiste à vérifier le bon fonctionnement d'un système tout au long de sa durée d'utilisation et ce, sans intervention humaine. Elle permet de mettre en place une stratégie de maintenance prévisionnelle qui présente un intérêt économique majeur, en particulier dans le cas de systèmes isolés comme les éoliennes construites en pleine mer. La surveillance automatique se base sur l'acquisition plus ou moins régulière de signaux pendant le fonctionnement du système surveillé. L'analyse de ces signaux doit permettre d'établir un diagnostic et de prendre une décision sur le déclenchement des opérations de maintenance. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une méthode d'analyse générique permettant de s'adapter à n'importe quel système surveillé. La méthode se déroule en plusieurs étapes. Premièrement, chaque signal est analysé individuellement pour en extraire son contenu spectral, c'est-à-dire identifier les pics spectraux, les séries harmoniques et les bandes de modulation présents dans sa densité spectrale. Ensuite, ce contenu spectral est suivi au cours du temps pour former des trajectoires sur l'ensemble de la séquence de signaux acquis. Ces trajectoires permettent de générer des tendances qui sont le reflet de la santé du système. Enfin, les tendances sont analysées pour identifier un changement au cœur du système qui serait synonyme d'usure ou de défaut naissant. Cette méthodologie est validée sur de nombreux signaux réels provenant de la surveillance de différents systèmes mécaniques. / The automatic monitoring consists in verifying without any human intervention that a system is operating well. The monitoring allows to use a predictive maintenance strategy, which is economically interesting, especially in the case of isolated systems like off-shore wind turbines. The automatic monitoring is based on signals acquired more or less regularly while the monitored system is operating. The analysis of these signals should be sufficient to diagnose the system and to decide whether or not the maintenance operations should be done. In this thesis, we propose a generic analysis method able to adapt itself to any monitored system. This method is composed by several steps. First, each signal is analyzed individually in order to extract its spectral content, that is to identify the spectral peaks, the harmonic series and the modulation sidebands presents in the signal spectrum. Then, the spectral content is tracked through time to construct spectral trajectories in the sequence of acquired signal. These trajectories are used to generate trends which indicate the state of the system health. Finally, the trends are analyzed to identify a change in the system response which would indicate some wear or a fault in is early stage. This analysis method is validated on real world signals acquired on different mechanical systems.

The study concerns the analysis of vocal cycle length perturbations in normophonic and dysphonic speakers.A method for tracking cycle lengths in voiced speech is proposed. The speech cycles are detected via the saliences of the speech signal samples, defined as the length of the temporal interval over which a sample is a maximum. The tracking of the cycle lengths is based on a dynamic programming algorithm that does not request that the signal is locally periodic and the average period length known a priori.The method is validated on a corpus of synthetic stimuli. The results show a good agreement between the extracted and the synthetic reference length time series. The method is able to track accurately low-frequency modulations and ast cycle-to-cycle perturbations of up to 10% and 4% respectively over the whole range of vocal frequencies. Robustness with regard to the background noise has lso been tested. The results indicate that the tracking is reliable for signal-to-noise ratios higher than 15dB.A method for analyzing the size of the cycle length perturbations as well as their frequency is proposed. The cycle length time series is decomposed into a sum of oscillating components by empirical mode decomposition the instantaneous envelopes and frequencies of which are obtained via AM-FM decomposition. Based on their average instantaneous frequencies, the empirical modes are then assigned to four categories (declination, physiological tremor, neurological tremor as well as cycle length jitter) and added within each. The within-category size of the cycle length perturbations is estimated via the standard deviation of the empirical mode sum divided by the average cycle length. The neurological tremor modulation frequency and bandwidth are obtained via the instantaneous frequencies and amplitudes of empirical modes in the neurological tremor category and summarized via a weighted instantaneous frequency probability density, compensating for the effects of mode mixing.The method is applied to two corpora of vowels comprising 123 and 74 control and 456 and 205 Parkinson speaker recordings respectively. The results indicate that the neurological tremor modulation depth is statistically significantly higher for female Parkinson speakers than for female control speakers. Neurological tremor frequency differs statistically significantly between male and female speakers and increases statistically significantly for the pooled Parkinson speakers compared to the pooled control speakers. Finally, the average vocal frequency increases for male Parkinson speakers and decreases for female Parkinson speakers, compared to the control speakers. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

M. Tech. (Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Applied and Computer Sciences), Vaal University of Technology. / Tracking involves information gathering, manipulation and proving information on the location of a set item. Many single or hybrid technologies – Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency (RF), Bluetooth (BLT) or Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) – have been used to provide tracking information of an asset of interest. The use of hybrid technology in tracking assets has proven to be effective if the selection of the technologies used is done correctly. This study used a hybrid of GPS and Radio Frequency technologies to track assets of interest because of their characteristics for use inside and outside a building. In this study GPS geo-fencing was used and time interval was used to receive data from the technology. Heuristic methodology, which enabled us to divide a room into sections, was used, where testing was done in sections in a room with different types of material, such as bricks, wood or metal, and the RF signal degradation, called attenuation, was measured. A straight-line distance and a sum of distances at 30-minute intervals were calculated to determine how far the asset had travelled from the point of origin to the new position. A distance of less than 10 metres was ignored. Geofencing was used to trigger an event since it indicates that the asset has crossed the permitted boundary. An RF reader was placed at the door to identify when the asset left a building and triggered an event. A model was used for searching for a missing item in a room. The results showed that the system was able to produce two distances, one straight-line distance and the other the approximate sum distance travelled by the asset in 30-minute intervals. The RF model was able to find an asset in a room filled with different materials.