This thesis consisted of three parts. The first part discussed the RF architecture for the digital video broadcasting-handheld (DVB-H) system. The system planning and link budget of the RF receiver are included in this part. The effects of phase noise from local oscillator on the OFDM system are also considered here. The second part introduced the implementation of each stage for the designed receiver link. The measurement results for the entire RF receiver module are discussed in the third part, at which the link budget results are also presented for comparison. The sensitivity of the designed RF receiver module is -83 dBm, the dynamic range is more than 73 dB, and the power consumption is 345 mW. The designed RF receiver adopts the dual conversion with zero second IF architecture reduces the number of ICs, passive components, and the power consumption. In addition, the SAW filter is no longer required in the receiver link, and it is more suitable for the system-on-chip application.

This research was aimed to investigate the enhancement of electrokinetic (EK) remediation arsenate-contaminated soil by permeable reaction barrier (PRB). All experiments, which experimental parameters included the position, materials, and quantity of PRB, processing fluid types, potential gradients, and treatment time, were conducted in two types of EK systems. One was Pyrex glass cylindrical cells with dimension of 4.2 cm (£r) ¡Ñ 12 cm (L) and the other was a small pilot-scale modulus with dimension of 36cm (L) ¡Ñ18cm (W) ¡Ñ18cm cm (H). The PRBs were composed of four kinds of reaction materials, which included commercial zero valent iron (Fe(0)C), manufactured zero valent iron (Fe(0)M), commercial hydrous ferric oxide (FeOOHC), and manufactured hydrous ferric oxide (FeOOHM), mixed with ottawa sand in a ratio of 1:2,respectively, and installed in the anode, middle, and cathode side of the EK systems. For 5-day EK cylindrical cell tests, the results showed that the PRB installation would result in a lower electroosmosis permeability (Ke) and a higher removal efficiency of arsenate. The arsenate removal efficiency of EK system with PRB was in the range of 43.89-70.25%, which was 1.5~2.6 times greater than that without PRB, and the value of Ke was in the range of 4.30-12.61¡Ñ10-6 cm2/V-s. The soil pH after EK/PRB treatment was much closer to natural and more arsenate was collected in the anode reservoir. Moreover, the remediation performance of FeOOHC as PRB materials was much better than other materials. For EK pilot-scale modulus tests, it was shown that the removal efficiency of arsenate was effectively enhanced as improved experimental parameters and, however, led to increase the treatment cost. In EK modulus without PRB, the removal efficiency of arsenate, elctroosmosis permeability, and energy consumption were 27.76%, 3.30-5.39¡Ñ10-6 cm2/V-s, and 1724.81 kWh/m3, respectively. Furthermore, the treatment cost was NT 9583/m3. As increasing treatment time, graphite electrode, potential gradient, and quantity of PRB materials, the removal efficiency of arsenate increased to as high as 45.11-71.22% and the treatment cost also increased up to NT 24,800-57,730/m3. As investigated the binding form of arsenate with soil after EK/PRB treatment, it was found that the arsenate ¡Vsoil binding forms of Fe-Mn oxide bound, organically bound, and residual in the soil section behind the PRB were much easier transformed to the forms of exchangeable and carbonate bound. The transformation rate reached as high as 72.5% and it increased with treatment time. However, the Fe-Mn oxide bound was still the main binding form, 61.6-81.6%, in the soil section prior to the PRB. The removal mechanism of arsenate contaminated soil remediation was dominated by electromigration, electrolysis, and electroosmosis in EK system without PRB. And, in EK/PRB system, the removal of arsenate from soil was mainly resulted from adsorption rather than redox reaction by PRB. To sum up, the PRB can effectively enhance the electrokinetic remediation of arsenate contaminated soil by choosing the right PRB materials and operation parameters.

This thesis uses Spline-based model, which was developed by McCulloch, and parsimonious model, which was developed by Nelson-Siegel, to estimate the yield curves of zero-coupon bonds in Turkey. In this thesis, we construct the data by using Turkish secondary government zero-coupon bond data, which contain the data from January 2005 to June 2005. After that, relative performances of models are compared using in-sample goodness of fit. As a result, we see that performance of McCulloch model in fitting yield is better than that of Nelson-Siegel model.

This dissertation proposes a novel control technique for power density maximization of the brushless DC (BLDC) generator which is a nonsinusoidal power supply system. In a generator of given rating, the weight and size of the system affect the fuel consumption directly, therefore power density is one of the most important issues in a stand-alone generator. Conventional rectification methods cannot achieve the maximum power possible because of a distorted or unsuitable current waveform. The optimal current waveform for maximizing power density and minimizing machine size and weight in a nonsinusoidal power supply system has been proposed theoretically and verified by simulation and experimental work. Also, various attributes of practical interest are analyzed and simulated to investigate the impact on real systems.

Amplitude and Phase Shift Keying (APSK) format is one of the most attractive advanced modulation formats because of its good spectral efficiency. As the information bandwidth of the current optical fiber communication system is limited by the optical amplifier bandwidth, it is important to utilize the limited bandwidth effectively. This master thesis focuses on to study the transmission performance of the APSK format both theoretically and experimentally. At first, a theoretical study was conducted using a numerical simulation. As the Extinction Ratio (ER) of the Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK) signal affects the performances of both the ASK and the Phase Shift Keying (PSK) signals, the effect of the ER upon the transmission performance of the APSK format was studied. A clear trade-off between the performance of the ASK signal and the PSK signal due to the change of the ER was observed. Then, in order to improve the performance of the APSK format, a method to improve the transmission performance was proposed. This method was named as ¡§zero-nulling method¡¨, and it solved the trade-off issue caused by the ER. The effectiveness of this method was confirmed through the numerical simulation. Next, an experimental study was conducted. An experimental setup including 330km optical fiber transmission line was prepared, and it was used to confirm the results of the theoretical simulation. The performance trade-off between the ASK and the PSK signals due to the ER was confirmed experimentally. Finally, another experimental study was conducted. An experimental setup of 500km transmission line was used for this study. By adopting the recirculating loop experimental setup, the transmission length could be extended to a few thousand kilometers. The applicability of the ¡§zero-nulling method¡¨ was confirmed using this experimental setup.

This thesis proposes a novel dual passband filter architecture and develops a design flow and synthesis method for this architecture. The technical contents include the fundamental passband filter design and the further methods for generating the higher second passband and the multiple transmission zeros. This thesis organizes a design flow based on analytical formulation for the proposed dual passband filter architecture. One can follow this design flow to substitute the filter specifications into the formulation and then can obtain the necessary element values for the filter architecture that match the specified specifications. The dual passband filter architecture is finally implemented on LTCC substrate for WLAN (IEEE 802.11 a/b/g) applications with verification of S parameters using EM-simulation and actual measurement.

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of using nanoscale zero-valent iron (nZVI) as the source of hydrogen to enhance in situ anaerobic biodegradation of trichloroethylene (TCE). In the first part of this study, microcosms were constructed to evaluate the effects of different controlling factors [e.g., different redox conditions (aerobic and anaerobic conditions), different microorganisms (in situ microorganisms, activated sludge, and anaerobic sludge), and different sources of substrates and electron donors (phenol, cane molasses, hydrogen, and nZVI)] on TCE biodegradation. In the second part of this study, batch experiments were conducted to evaluate the feasibility of hydrogen production by nZVI and bimetallic particles. Results from the microcosm study indicate that in-situ microorganisms were capable of degrading TCE under aerobic and anaerobic conditions. Results also show that TCE removal was more effective by activated sludge and anaerobic sludge. Aerobic biodegradation of TCE was enhanced by the addition of phenol and cane molasses. Under anaerobic conditions, TCE removal could be improved when cane molasses and hydrogen were supplied. In addition, anaerobic TCE degradation was more effective with the presence of hydrogen. Results of microcosms conducted with the addition of nZVI reveal that TCE was degraded completely in both live and autoclaved microcosms. This indicates that chemical reductive dechlorination seemed to dominate the removal of TCE in microcosms. Therefore, further studies with higher TCE concentrations or lower nZVI doses need to be conducted to determine the effects of the produced hydrogen on TCE biodegradation. Results from the hydrogen production experiments indicate that efficiency of hydrogen production by nZVI ranged from 30% to 76%. Higher dose of nZVI addition resulted in higher amount of hydrogen production. The total amounts of hydrogen production were correlated with the doses of nZVI. In addition, rates and efficiency of hydrogen production by bimetallic particles were better than those of nZVI. Results of the batch experiments reveal that nZVI and bimetallic particles had good efficiency on hydrogen production. This indicates that nZVI and bimetallic particles have high potential to be used as hydrogen producers. In this study, a simple system consisted of only water and nZVI or bimetallic particles was applied to produce hydrogen. Although TCE in microcosms with nZVI addition was totally consumed by nZVI, results of microcosms with hydrogen addition demonstrated that hydrogen was able to improve the efficiency of anaerobic TCE biodegradation. Thus, it may be feasible to use nZVI as the source of hydrogen to enhance in situ anaerobic biodegradation of TCE. The advantages of using nZVI as the source of hydrogen include: (1) rapid removal of significant contaminant concentrations in the early stage of nZVI injection; (2) creation of a more reducing environment; (3) safer than liquid hydrogen, which is stored in steel containers; and (4) direct hydrogen supply without transfer of biological mechanisms compared to commercial hydrogen release compounds and other organic substrates. Results of this study suggest that biological reductive dechlorination of TCE can be enhanced if proper doses of nZVI are supplied in situ. Knowledge and comprehension obtained in this study will be helpful in designing an enhanced in situ anaerobic bioremediation system for a TCE-contaminated site.

<p>The use of computers for handling image data in the healthcare is growing. The amount of data produced by modern image generating techniques, such as CT and MR, is vast. The amount of data might be a problem from a storage point of view or when the data is sent over a network. To overcome these problems data compression techniques adapted to these applications are needed. There are an abundant number of compression schemes for the compression of images, but few that are geared towards compression of image stacks. Though these 2D techniques can be applied to the image stacks they do not fully exploit the three-dimensional nature of the stacks. In this thesis ideas from the image compression area are extended to exploit the 3D nature of image stacks. Attention is directed to MR and CT stacks. The compression schemes in this thesis are based on the relatively new notion of wavelets, used in the JPEG2000 standard. The schemes also providea quality progressive transmission, which allows intermediate low-quality results to be constructed. Two different coders are presented in this thesis both developed for the compression of image stacks containing medical data. They are evaluated and compared and a top performer is chosen. Advantages and drawbacks of the schemes and future enhancements are also discussed.</p>

Multivariate ordinal response data, such as severity of pain, degree of disability, and satisfaction with a healthcare provider, are prevalent in many areas of research including public health, biomedical, and social science research. Ignoring the multivariate features of the response variables, that is, by not taking the correlation between the errors across models into account, may lead to substantially biased estimates and inference. In addition, such multivariate ordinal outcomes frequently exhibit a high percentage of zeros (zero inflation) at the lower end of the ordinal scales, as compared to what is expected under a multivariate ordinal distribution. Thus, zero inflation coupled with the multivariate structure make it difficult to analyze such data and properly interpret the results. Methods that have been developed to address the zero-inflated data are limited to univariate-logit or univariate-probit model, and extension to bivariate (or multivariate) probit models has been very limited to date. In this research, a latent variable approach was used to develop a Mixture Bivariate Zero-Inflated Ordered Probit (MBZIOP) model. A Bayesian MCMC technique was used for parameter estimation. A simulation study was then conducted to compare the performances of the estimators of the proposed model with two existing models. The simulation study suggested that for data with at least a moderate proportion of zeros in bivariate responses, the proposed model performed better than the comparison models both in terms of lower bias and greater accuracy (RMSE). Finally, the proposed method was illustrated with a publicly-available drug-abuse dataset to identify highly probable predictors of: (i) being a user/nonuser of marijuana, cocaine, or both; and (ii), conditional on user status, the level of consumption of these drugs. The results from the analysis suggested that older individuals, smokers, and people with a prior criminal background have a higher risk of being a marijuana only user, or being the user of both drugs. However, cocaine only users were predicted on the basis of being younger and having been engaged in the criminal-justice system. Given that an individual is a user of marijuana only, or user of both drugs, age appears to have an inverse effect on the latent level of consumption of marijuana as well as cocaine. Similarly, given that a respondent is a user of cocaine only, all covariates--age, involvement in criminal activities, and being of black race--are strong predictors of the level of cocaine consumption. The finding of older age being associated with higher drug consumption may represent a survival bias whereby previous younger users with high consumption may have been at elevated risk of premature mortality. Finally, the analysis indicated that blacks are likely to use less marijuana, but have a higher latent level of cocaine given that they are user of both drugs.

This report discusses two methods of visualizing complex solutions of polynomials: modulus surfaces and vector fields. Both provide valuable information about the location of complex solutions and their multiplicity. A sketch of a proof of The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra utilizing modulus surfaces and complex analysis is also included. / text