The general aim was, within psychiatric inpatient care, to explore patient and staff perceptions with regard to medication administration and locked entrance doors. In Study I, medication administration was illuminated according to a mini-ethnographic approach. Nurses and voluntarily admitted patients were observed and interviewed. Two central categories of patient and nurse experiences were identified, get control and leave control. In Study II, patients and nurses were interviewed about patient experiences of forced medication. Identified experiences were related to the disease, being forcibly medicated, and the drug. In Study III, the frequency of and reasons for locked entrance doors on Swedish psychiatric inpatient wards were investigated. Seventy three per cent of the doors were locked on a specific day. According to ward managers, doors were most often locked in order to prevent patients from escaping, provide security and safety, and because legalisation. In Study IV/V, voluntarily admitted patients/mental nurse assistants and nurses were interviewed about advantages and disadvantages about being cared for/working on a psychiatric inpatient ward with a locked entrance door. Most advantages mentioned by patients and staff were categorised as protection against “the outside”, secure and efficient care, and control over patients. Most disadvantages mentioned by patients were categorised as confinement, dependence on the staff, and emotional problems for patients. Most disadvantages mentioned by staff were categorised as extra work, confinement, dependence on the staff, and a non-caring environment. In conclusion, medication administration and locked entrance doors are perceived as connected with staff’s control and restricted freedom for patients. Increased reflection among staff about how medication administration and locked entrance doors are perceived by patients would increase staff’s possibilities to prevent potential experiences of coercion due to these situations among patients in psychiatric inpatient care.

Phase Locked Loops(PLLs) are an integral part of almost every electronic system. Systems involving low frequency clocks often require PLLs with low bandwidth. The area occupied by the large loop filter capacitor and resistor in a low bandwidth PLL design makes the realization of traditional charge-pump PLL architecture impractical on a single die, mandating external components on the board. In order to maintain low loop bandwidth the designer is often forced to choose very low values of charge pump current which can lead to reliability issues. In this work, a semi-digital architecture for very low bandwidth monolithic PLLs is proposed. This architecture eliminates large components in traditional charge-pump PLL, thus allowing the realization of on-chip low bandwidth PLLs. A 2x2mm PLL is realized in 180nm CMOS with 75mHz bandwidth consuming 400μW power from 1.8V supply. The prototype PLL locks to an input clock of 1Hz and generates 20kHz output clock with a measured peak-to-peak jitter of 100ns. / Graduation date: 2013

A brain-computer interface (BCI) allows individuals to communicate through the modulation of regional brain activity. Clinical near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is used to monitor changes in cerebral blood oxygenation due to functional activation. It was hypothesized that visually-cued emotional induction tasks can elicit detectable activity in the prefrontal cortex. Data were collected from eleven participants as they performed positively and negatively-valenced emotional induction tasks. Baseline and activation trials were classified offline with accuracies from 75.0-96.7% after applying a feature selection algorithm to determine optimal performance parameters for each participant. Feature selection identified common discriminatory features across participants and relationships between performance parameters. Additionally, classification accuracy was used to quantify NIRS hemodynamic response latency. Significant increases in classification rates were found as early as 2.5 s after initial stimulus presentation. These results suggest the potential application of emotional induction as a NIRS-BCI control paradigm.

Size reduction processes, particularly fine grinding systems, in mineral processing and cement production plants constitute a great portion of energy consumption and operating costs. Therefore, the grinding systems should be designed properly and operated under optimum conditions to achieve productive and cost effective operations. The use of simulation based on kinetic mathematical models of grinding has proven useful in this respect. The kinetic models contain two essential parameters, namely, breakage rate and breakage distribution functions, that are to be determined experimentally, and preferably in laboratory, or by back-calculation from the mill product size distribution for a given feed size distribution. Experimental determination of the breakage parameters has been mostly carried out in laboratory batch mills using one-size-fraction material. The breakage rate parameter is obtained from the disappearance rate of this one-size-fraction material, while the breakage distribution parameters are estimated from the short-time grinding of the same material. Such laboratory methods using one-size fraction material, however, are not truly representative of industrial continuous mill operations where the mill contents have a distribution of particle sizes. There is evidence in the literature that the size distribution of the mill contents affects the breakage parameters. This thesis study was undertaken with the main purpose of investigating the effect of the size distribution of the mill hold-up on the brekage parameters of quartz and calcite minerals in lockedcycle dry grinding experiments. The locked-cycle and one-size-fraction experiments were performed in the Bond ball mill instrumented with a torque-measuring device. Different closing screen sizes were used in the locked-cycle work to produce different size distributions of the mill hold-up, and the operating conditions were changed in the one-size-fraction experiments to obtain different power draws. Particle breakage parameters were assessed for these changing conditions. Prior to the experiments related to the main purpose of the study, preliminary experiments were conducted for two reasons: (i) to find the power draw of the Bond mill in relation to the operating conditions with the intention of eliminating the use of costly torque-measuring devices by others / and (ii) to find the most accurate estimation method of breakage distribution functions among the three existing methods, namely, the &ldquo / zero-order production of fines&rdquo / method, the BII method, and the G-H method. The G-H method was found to be more appropriate for the current study. The locked-cycle grinding experiments revealed that the breakage rate function of coarse fractions increased with increasing proportion of fines in the mill hold-up. Breakage distribution functions were found to be environment-dependent and non-normalizable by size in one-size-fraction and locked cycle grinding experiments. It was concluded that the cumulative basis breakage rate function could sufficiently represent the breakage characteristics of the two studied materials in a wide range of operating conditions. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to evaluate the breakage characteristics of materials ground in ball mills by linearized form of the size-discretized batch grinding equation using single parameter instead of dealing with two parameters which may not be independent of each other.

A brain-computer interface (BCI) allows individuals to communicate through the modulation of regional brain activity. Clinical near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is used to monitor changes in cerebral blood oxygenation due to functional activation. It was hypothesized that visually-cued emotional induction tasks can elicit detectable activity in the prefrontal cortex. Data were collected from eleven participants as they performed positively and negatively-valenced emotional induction tasks. Baseline and activation trials were classified offline with accuracies from 75.0-96.7% after applying a feature selection algorithm to determine optimal performance parameters for each participant. Feature selection identified common discriminatory features across participants and relationships between performance parameters. Additionally, classification accuracy was used to quantify NIRS hemodynamic response latency. Significant increases in classification rates were found as early as 2.5 s after initial stimulus presentation. These results suggest the potential application of emotional induction as a NIRS-BCI control paradigm.

The objective of this research is to demonstrate the feasibility of the implementation of wideband RF CMOS PLLs with high spectral purity using deep sub-micron technologies. To achieve wide frequency coverage, this dissertation proposed a 45-nm SOI-CMOS RF PLL with a wide frequency range to support multiple standards. The PLL has small parasitic capacitance with the help of a SOI technology, increasing the frequency tuning range of a capacitor bank. A designed and fabricated chip demonstrates the PLL supporting almost all cellular standards with a single PLL. This dissertation also proposed a third order sample-hold loop filter with two MOS switches for high spectral purity. Sample-hold operation improves in-band and out-of-band phase noise performance simultaneously in RF PLLs. By controlling the size of the MOS switches and control time, the nonideal effects of the MOS switches are minimized. The sample-hold loop filter is implemented within a 45-nm RF PLL and the performance is evaluated. Thus, this research provides a solution for wideband CMOS frequency synthesizers for multi-band, multi-mode, and multiple-standard applications in deep sub-micron technologies.

In this report a phase locked loop (PLL) system for grid voltage phase tracking has been investigated. The grid voltage phase angle contains critical information for connecting a power plant, such as a wave energy converter, to the grid. A synchronous reference frame PLL system with PI-regulator gains calculated with the symmetrical optimum method has been designed and simulations in SIMULINK have been made. For ideal grid conditions the phase angle was tracked fast and accurate. For non-ideal conditions the phase angle was tracked but with less accuracy, due to slow dynamics of the system, but still within acceptable margins. In order to test this system further it has to be implemented in a control system and tested when connected to the grid.

POTS (Plain Old Telephony Service) systems have traditionally been connected via synchronous connections. When installing new nodes in the telephone network, they may sometimes be connected via packet networks such as Ethernet. Ethernet is an asynchronous network which means that nodes connected to the network don’t have access to the same clock frequency if it is not provided in some other way. If two nodes have different clock frequency, the receiver’s buffer will eventually overflow or starve. While not being a severe problem for telephony, devices used for data transmission, e.g. modems and fax will not be able to function properly. To avoid this it is necessary to synchronize the nodes. This thesis investigates methods to synchronize nodes connected over Ethernet by simulating them in Matlab. The simulations show that under certain circumstances it is possible to produce a clock signal conforming to relevant standards.

Mixed-signal designs are becoming more and more complex every day. In order to adapt to the new market requirements, a formal process for design and verification of mixed signal systems i. e. top-down design and bottom-up verification methodology is required. This methodology has already been established for digital design. The goal of this research is to propose a new design methodology for mixed signal systems. In the first two chapters of this thesis, the need for a mixed signal design flow based on top-down design methodology will be discussed. The proposed design flow is based on behavioral modeling of the mixed signal system using one of the mixed signal behavioral modeling languages. These models can be used for design and verification through different steps of the design from system level modeling to final physical design. The other advantage of the proposed flow is analog and digital co-design. In the remaining chapters of this thesis, the proposed design flow was verified by designing an 800 MHz mixed signal PLL. The PLL uses a charge pump phase frequency detector, a single capacitor loop filter, and a feed forward error correction architecture using an active damping control circuit instead of passive resistor in loop filter. The design was done in 0. 18- <i>µ</i> m CMOS process technology.

We comprehensively investigated the concentration effect of dispersed single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) in polymer films for being a saturable absorber (SA) to stabilize the mode locking performance of the Erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) pulse through the diagnosis of its nonlinear properties of SA. The measured modulation depth was 1 to 4.5% as the thickness increased from 18 to 265 £gm. We obtained the stable pulse of the mode-locked EDFL (MLEDFL) when the full-width half-maximum (FWHM) decreased from 3.43 to 2.02 ps as the concentrations of SWCNTs SA increased from 0.125 to 0.5 wt%. At constant concentration of 0.125 wt%, the similar pulse shortening effect of the MLEDFL was also observed when the FWHM decreased from 3.43 to 1.85 ps was the thickness of SWCNTs SA increased from 8 to 100 £gm. In EDFL system, we vary group-velocity dispersion (GVD) with different cavity length to achieve optical pulse compression. We got the shortest pulsewidth was 713 fs, and the time-bandwidth product (TBP) was 0.345. An in-depth study on the stable mode-locked pulse formation employing SWCNTs SA, it is possible to fabricate the SWCNT films for use in high performance MLEDFL and utilization of many other low-cost nanodevices.