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A medical ventilator is a life-sustaining device that helps critically ill patients with complete or partial breathing support. It provides a patient with the right amount of air and/or oxygen as per requirement. It is therefore essential to have a highly accurate device controlling the flow of these essential gases. In ventilators developed by Maquet, an electro-mechanical device called Gas-Module is used for gas flow control. The Gas-Module is the heart of the ventilator since it is responsible for providing the patient with the right amount of gas at the right time. The focus of this thesis is on improving the accuracy of the gas flow control in these Gas-Modules. This is done through identifying various factors that influence the accuracy of gas flow control, and then finding an efficient method to calibrate the Gas-Modules. Calibration of a Gas-Module is done by tuning values of components in the analog electronic circuit. In this thesis, an electrical model of the circuit is built to simulate various modes of operation. A new trimming method is proposed that with a few measurements, and a simulation model, can be predict the optimal calibration parameters. This method helps to improve accuracy at various flow rates. Predicting the calibration parameters in advance avoids many iteration cycles of measure-adjust-measure which would otherwise be required to calibrate the Gas-Module. The new trimming method proposed in this thesis also has the potential to save calibration time of each Gas-Module and thus save production cost. / Medicinsk ventilator är en livsupphållande apparat som hjälper kritiska sjuka patienter med helt eller partiellt andningsstöd. Den förser en patient med rätt mängd luft eller syre efter individuellt behov. Det är därför viktigt att ha en mycket noggranna anordning som styr flödet av dessa viktiga gaser. I ventilatorer från Maquet görs detta med hjälp av gasmoduler som är en elektromekanisk enhet som styr flödet. Denna modul kallas också hjärtat i en ventilatorn eftersom den ansvarar för tillförseln av rätt mängd gas vid rätt tidpunkt. Arbetet som beskrivs i denna avhandling fokuseras på att förbättra noggrannhet för gasflödeskontroll i dessa gasmoduler. Detta görs genom att identifiera olika faktorer som påverkar flödeskontrollens noggrannhet och sedan hitta en effektiv metod för kalibrering av gasmodulerna. Kalibrering av gasmodul görs genom att justera värdet på elektriska komponenter i kontroll kretsen. I denna avhandling buggdes upp en elektrisk modell av kretsen för att simulera olika driftfall. En ny trimmningsmetod föreslås att med hjälp av ett fåtal mätningar och en funktions modell kan de mest optimala kalibrerings parametrarna prediceras. Denna metod hjälper till att förbättra noggrannheten vid olika flödesbehov.Att förutsäga kalibreringsparametrarna i förväg undviker många mätjusteringscykler som annars skulle krävas för att kalibrera en gasmodul. Med denna nya metod reduceras caliberingstid för varje gasmodul vilket kan bidra till minskade produktions kostnader.

<p>This thesis investigates the characteristics of a long aspect ratio synthetic jet actuator and its application for the active control of the vibrations of the downstream cylinder in a tandem cylinder arrangement.</p> <p>A long aspect ratio synthetic jet is produced through an axial slit along part of the length of a cylinder. The jet is excited acoustically by a pair of loudspeakers mounted at the cylinder terminations. The study compares between the performance of two different slits with aspect ratios of 273 and 773. The comparison is based on the spanwise distribution of the mean jet velocity and phase between the jet velocity fluctuations and the excitation signal. Three different frequencies and amplitudes are used to excite the speakers covering the range of frequencies used in the control application.</p> <p>For both cases studied the mean centerline velocity of the jet increases with increasing the amplitude of the exciting signal, but decreases with increasing its frequency. Moreover, velocity deficits of up to 30% are evident as the midspan of the cylinder is approached from either end. Similar trends are also observed for the centerline phase distributions of the velocity fluctuations, with deficits of up to 130°. However, it is observed that for the long slit case the deficits in both the velocity and phase distributions are much larger than those for the short one.</p> <p>The synthetic jet is then mounted in the upstream cylinder of a tandem cylinder arrangement to be used as a control actuator for controlling the vibrations of the downstream cylinder. A simple feedback control mechanism is used at a Reynolds</p> <p>number of about 6.3x104. This Reynolds number corresponds to the case where the iii</p> <p>downstream cylinder’s response is dominated with two frequency components, one at the resonance frequency of the cylinder, which is excited by broadband turbulence in the flow, and the other at the vortex shedding frequency. Both slits studied for the characterization experiments are used to compare their performance as control actuators.</p> <p>Both jets produce comparable reductions in the vibration of the downstream cylinder. A reduction of about 20% in the total RMS amplitude of the vibrations signal is achieved. This amounts to a reduction of about 50% in the resonant peak and an average value of about 40% in the vortex shedding peak. The optimal values of gain and time lag of the controller are then used to investigate the effect of the jet on the flow. It is found that the short slit jet produced an effect that was traced up to 1.875 diameters downstream, while the effect of the long slit jet dropped dramatically very close to the upstream cylinder.</p> / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Ducted fan vehicles possess a superior ability to maximize payload capacity while minimizing vehicle size. Their ability to both hover and fly at high speed is a key advantage for information-gathering missions, particularly when close proximity to a target is essential. However, the ducted fan's aerodynamic characteristics pose difficulties for stable vehicle flight and therefore require complex control algorithms. In particular, they exhibit a large nose-up pitching moment during wind gusts and when transitioning from hover to forward flight. Understanding ducted fan aerodynamic behavior and how it can be altered through flow control techniques are the two prime objectives of this work. This dissertation provides a new paradigm for modeling the ducted fan's nonlinear behavior and new methods for changing the duct aerodynamics using active flow control. Steady and piezoelectric synthetic jet blowing are employed in the flow control concepts and are compared. The new aerodynamic model captures the nonlinear characteristics of the force, moment, and power data for a ducted fan, while representing these terms in a set of simple equations. The model attains excellent agreement with current and legacy experimental data using twelve non-dimensional constants. Synthetic jet actuators (SJA) have potential for use in flow control applications in UAVs with limited size, weight, and power budgets. Piezoelectric SJAs for a ducted fan vehicle were developed through two rounds of experimental designs. The final SJA design attained peak jet velocities in the range of 225 ft/sec (69 m/s) for a 0.03â x 0.80â rectangular slot. To reduce the magnitude of the nose-up pitching moment in cross-winds, two flow control concepts were explored: flow separation control at the duct lip, and flow turning at the duct trailing edge using a CoandÄ surface. Both concepts were experimentally proven to be successful. Synthetic jets and steady jets were capable of modifying the ducted fan flow to reduce pitching moment, but some cases required high values of steady blowing to create significant responses. Triggering leading edge separation on the duct lip was one application where synthetic jets showed comparable performance to steady jets operating at a blowing coefficient an order of magnitude higher. / Ph. D.

<p dir="ltr">Protecting personal information is growing increasingly important to the general public, to the point that major tech companies now advertise the privacy features of their products. Despite this, it remains challenging to implement applications that do not leak private information either directly or indirectly, through timing behavior, memory access patterns, or control flow side channels. Existing security and cryptographic techniques such as secure multiparty computation (MPC) provide solutions to privacy-preserving computation, but they can be difficult to use for non-experts and even experts.</p><p dir="ltr">This dissertation develops the design, theory and implementation of various language-based techniques that help programmers write privacy-critical applications under a strong threat model. The proposed languages support private structured data, such as trees, that may hide their structural information and complex policies that go beyond whether a particular field of a record is private. More crucially, the approaches described in this dissertation decouple privacy and programmatic concerns, allowing programmers to implement privacy-preserving applications modularly, i.e., to independently develop application logic and independently update and audit privacy policies. Secure-by-construction applications are derived automatically by combining a standard program with a separately specified security policy.</p><p><br></p>