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Yes / The low voltage (LV) distribution network is the last stage of the power network, which is connected directly to the end user customers and supplies many dispersed small-scale loads. In order to achieve environmental targets and to address the energy shortage issue, governments worldwide increase the renewable energy sources (RES) into the electricity grid. In addition, different types of low carbon technologies (LCTs) such as electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming widely used. A significant portion of RES and LCTs is penetrated into the LV distribution network, which poses a wide range of challenges. In order to address these challenges, there is a persistent need to develop traditional planning and operation frameworks to cope with these new technologies. In this context, this paper provides a comprehensive review about planning, operation, and management of LV distribution networks. The characteristics, types, and topologies of LV distribution networks plus different aspects of operation and planning are investigated. An insightful investigation of the reasons impacts and mitigation of voltage and current unbalanced in LV networks is provided. Moreover, the main three-phase power flow techniques used to analyze the LV networks are analyzed.

Les méthodes à l’état de l’art de la reconnaissance de l’écriture sont fondées sur des réseaux de neurones récurrents (RNN) à cellules LSTM ayant des performances remarquables. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons deux nouveaux principes la vérification lexicale et la génération de cohorte afin d’attaquer les problèmes de la reconnaissance de l’écriture : i) le problème des grands lexiques et des décodages dirigés par le lexique ii) la problématique de combinaison de modèles optiques pour une meilleure reconnaissance iii) la nécessité de constituer de très grands ensembles de données étiquetées dans un contexte d’apprentissage profond. La vérification lexicale est une alternative aux décodages dirigés par le lexique peu étudiée à cause des faibles performances des modèles optiques historiques (HMM). Nous montrons dans cette thèse qu’elle constitue une alternative intéressante aux approches dirigées par le lexique lorsqu’elles s’appuient sur des modèles optiques très performants comme les RNN LSTM. La génération de cohorte permet de générer facilement et rapidement un grand nombre de réseaux récurrents complémentaires en un seul apprentissage. De ces deux techniques nous construisons et proposons un nouveau schéma de cascade pour la reconnaissance de mots isolés, une nouvelle combinaison au niveau ligne LV-ROVER et une nouvelle stratégie d’auto-apprentissage de RNN LSTM pour la reconnaissance de mots isolés. La cascade proposée permet de combiner avec la vérification lexicale des milliers de réseaux et atteint des résultats à l’état de l’art pour les bases Rimes et IAM. LV-ROVER a une complexité réduite par rapport à l’algorithme original ROVER et permet de combiner des centaines de réseaux sans modèle de langage tout en dépassant l’état de l’art pour la reconnaissance de lignes sur le jeu de donnéesRimes. Notre stratégie d’auto-apprentissage permet d’apprendre à partir d’un seul réseau BLSTM et sans paramètres grâce à la cohorte et la vérification lexicale, elle montre d’excellents résultats sur les bases Rimes et IAM. / State-of-the-art methods for handwriting recognition are based on LSTM recurrent neural networks (RNN) which achieve high performance recognition. In this thesis, we propose the lexicon verification and the cohort generation as two new building blocs to tackle the problem of handwriting recognition which are : i) the large vocabulary problem and the use of lexicon driven methods ii) the combination of multiple optical models iii) the need for large labeled dataset for training RNN. The lexicon verification is an alternative to the lexicon driven decoding process and can deal with lexicons of 3 millions words. The cohort generation is a method to get easily and quickly a large number of complementary recurrent neural networks extracted from a single training. From these two new techniques we build and propose a new cascade scheme for isolated word recognition, a new line level combination LV-ROVER and a new self-training strategy to train LSTM RNN for isolated handwritten words recognition. The proposed cascade combines thousands of LSTM RNN with lexicon verification and achieves state-of-the art word recognition performance on the Rimes and IAM datasets. The Lexicon Verified ROVER : LV-ROVER, has a reduce complexity compare to the original ROVER algorithm and combine hundreds of recognizers without language models while achieving state of the art for handwritten line text on the RIMES dataset. Our self-training strategy use both labeled and unlabeled data with the unlabeled data being self-labeled by its own lexicon verified predictions. The strategy enables self-training with a single BLSTM and show excellent results on the Rimes and Iam datasets.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Entomology / Larry L. Buschman / C. Michael Smith / Several studies were conducted to develop soybean management options that could provide protection from the soybean stem borer, Dectes texanus LeConte. Selected soybean genotypes were screened for host plant resistance against D. texanus. Soybean plants were grown in a footprint that could be covered by a field cage. When beetles were flying in the fields they were collected and placed in the field cages to increase the insect feeding pressure on the test plants. A susceptible commercial soybean variety treated with the systemic insecticide fipronil was used as a positive antibiosis check. Both commercial soybean varieties and plant introductions (PIs) obtained from the USDA National Soybean Germplasm Collection in maturity groups (MG) VI to VIII were tested over a four-year period. Since the number of ovipositions per plant could not be controlled, the ratio of oviposition punctures (OP’s) per live larvae (OP/ Lv) was used as a novel index of potential plant antibiosis to D. texanus. Field evaluations identified PI165673 as a genotype with a very high OP/ Lv ratio - similar to that for the fipronil antibiosis control. PI165673 appears to be potential source of resistance to D. texanus. Factorial analysis indicated that soybean maturity group was not significant factor in the expression of resistance. The OP/ Lv ratio appears to be more sensitive means of identifying antibiosis than other more conventional damage indices. The use of field cages demonstrated consistent plant responses from year to year during the multi-year study. Greenhouse-grown soybean plants, including transgenic plants containing the Manduca sexta chitinase gene, were not morphologically appropriate for successful D. texanus oviposition because the greenhouse-grown plants were poorly developed and had not produced enough pith in petioles. Therefore the greenhouse results were inconclusive. Analysis of the vertical distribution of D. texanus oviposition on soybean plants revealed that D. texanus oviposition was most likely to occur on leaf petioles on the upper five nodes of the plant canopy. Histomorphological observations of plant petioles indicated that the proportion of the petiole perimeter occupied by vascular bundles might be related to D. texanus oviposition. Both foliar and seed applications of fipronil suppressed D. texanus larval damage on soybean plants. The efficacy of these treatments was sustained for long periods, even until adult beetles were present in early August. The effects of the fipronil seed-treatment and harvest date on grain yield were both significant while the interaction was not. A physiological yield loss of 8.2% and plant lodging losses of 2.9% were associated with D. texanus infestation.

I kölvattnet av Nollvisionen uppstår problem för oskyddade trafikanter. Vid mittseparering av 13-metersvägar blir utrymmet för dessa trafikantgrupper otillräckligt och nya lösningar måste till. Detta examensarbete syftar till att förbättra framkomligheten och trafiksäkerheten för oskyddade trafikanter på s k MLV (Mötesseparerad LandsVäg). Målet med examensarbetet har varit att inventera problem, identifiera förbättringsområden, finna bra lösningar samt att beräkna vilka kostnader som dessa lösningar orsakar.Som ett resultat av arbetet har framkommit att det saknas en nationell samstämmighet i synen på hur oskyddade trafikanter på MLV, skall behandlas. Vidare existerar det en stor fokusering i centrala direktiv, kanske mest inofficiella, på bilisters och transportörers behov vid utformningen av MLV. Som en konsekvens av detta har de oskyddade trafikanterna blivit undanträngda, både bildligt och fysiskt talat, från dessa vägtyper och därmed begränsas deras förflyttnings-möjligheter. Ytterligare resultat är att det behövs mer utredning kring hänvisning för de oskyddade trafikanterna på MLV, detta för att i möjligaste mån separera trafikantgrupperna.I arbetet har också utförts en kostnadsberäkning av en GCM-lösning (GCM står för Gång, Cykel och Moped) på en vägsträcka, riksväg 80 mellan Falun och Hofors. Kostnaden blev 1,1 - 2,2 mn kr, vilket motsvarar en projektfördyring med 4,4 - 11 %, beroende på alternativ. De viktigaste slutsatserna i arbetet är att man bör anstränga sig till det yttersta för att erbjuda ett alternativ till en MLV, och att man då också måste förbättra skyltningen, för att undvika att oskyddade trafikanter irrar sig in på MLV:n, trots acceptabla alternativvägar. För detta har ett förslag till ett nytt vägmärke framtagits, Alternativ GCM-väg längs MLV, se Bilaga 5.

Power line communication has been around in past decades and gained renewed attention thanks to the demand of high-speed Internet access. With the significant advantages of existing infrastructure and accessibility to even remote areas, power grid has become one of the promising competitors for multi-media transmission in household. However, the power line was not oriented for data transmission providing a rather hash environment. To overcome the difficulties, advanced modulation and channel coding schemes should be employed. In the thesis low density parity check code (LDPC) is employed to reduce the loss caused by various kinds of effects in the channel especially the noise since its performance approaches to Shannon capacity limit. Moreover, OFDM multi-carrier transmission technique is involved which could decrease the inter-symbol interference and frequency selective fading. Nevertheless, LDPC decoding process was designed specifically for the common Gaussian white noise condition, combined with OFDM modulation the system still could not provide satisfying and practicable performance so improvements are needed for the system. The main works of the thesis are as follows. Set up an environment of power line transmission investigating and simulating the channel characteristics; employ multi-path channel model and Class‐A noise model for further developing the improvement algorithms to deal with the selective fading and impulse noise. Two algorithms proposed here are from different perspectives: the first one is modifying initial posterior information for LDPC decoding and the second one aims at suppressing the impulse noise after demodulation. Finally, a few simulations are performed to reveal the effectiveness of proposed methods. As a result, the improved scheme shows a great superiority improving the performance by no less than 5dB compared to traditional system.

No description available.

Background: A major problem in the treatment of human hypertension is the late diagnosis of hypertension and, hence, the delayed start of treatment. Very often, hypertension has existed for a long time and cardiac damage has already developed. Therefore, we tested whether lateonset antihypertensive treatment is effective in lowering blood pressure (BP) and in reducing or even preventing left ventricular hypertrophy and fibrosis. Methods: Twenty-one male 60-week-old spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) were included. Fourteen rats received oral treatment with captopril (CAP) either as monotherapy or combined with nifedipine (CAP + NIF) over 22 weeks. Seven untreated SHR served as controls. We examined the therapeutic effects on BP, heart weight and histological and biochemical markers of left ventricular remodeling and fibrosis. Results: At 82 weeks of age, BP was reduced in the CAP and CAP + NIF groups by 44 and 51 mmHg, respectively (p < 0.001), but not in untreated controls. Despite the late therapy start, cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis were attenuated compared to controls. Both treatments reduced heart weight by 1.2 mg/g (25%, p = 0.001) and collagens I and III by 66% and 60%, respectively (p < 0.001), thus proving nearly equivalent cardioprotective efficacy. Conclusion: These data clearly emphasize the benefit of antihypertensive treatment in reducing BP and mitigating the development of cardiac damage even when treatment is started late in life.

The grid-connected photo-voltaic (PV) system is one of the most promising renewable energy solutions which offers many benefits to both the end user and the utility network and thus it has gained the popularity over the last few decades. However, due to the very nature of its invariability and weather dependencies, the large scale integration of this type of distributed generation has created challenges for the network operator while maintaining the quality of the power supply and also for reliable and safe operations of the grids. In this study, the behavioral impact of large scale PV system integration which are both steady and dynamic in nature was studied.  An aggregate PV model suited to study the impacts was built using MATLAB/Simulink.  The integration impacts of PV power to existing grids were studied with focus on the low voltage residential distribution grids of Mälarenergi Elnät AB (10/0.4 kV). The steady state impacts were related to voltage profile, network loss. It was found that the PV generation at the load end undisputedly improves the voltage profile of the grid especially for the load buses which are situated at farther end of the grid. Further, with regard to the overvoltage issue, which is generally a concern during the low load demand period it was concluded that, at a 50% PV penetration level, the voltage level for the load buses is within the limit of 103% as prescribed by the regulator excepting for few load buses. The voltage level for load buses which deviate from the regulatory requirement are located at distance of 1200 meter or further away from the substation. The dynamic impact studied were for voltage unbalancing in the grid, which was found to have greater impact at the load buses which is located farther compared to a bus located nearer to the substation. With respect to impact study related to introduction of harmonics to the grid due to PV system integration, it was found that amount of harmonic content which was measured as total harmonic distortion (THD) multiplies with integration of more number of PV system. For a 50 % penetration level of PV, the introduced harmonics into the representative network is very minimal. Also, it was observed from the simulation study that THD content are be less when the grid operates at low load condition with high solar irradiance compared to lower irradiance and high load condition.

In my master’s thesis, I consider with flow measurement. In shortness is described principle of flow sensors functionality, its advantages and disadvantages. I designed and made device for practice measurement of flow. On this device are installed three flowmeters The characteristic of this flowmeters were measured and evaluated. I made program in LabVIEW to collect and analyze information from instaled flowmeters.