<p>Have you thought of why you get tired or why you get hungry? Something in your body keeps track of time. It is almost like you have a clock that tells you all those things.</p><p>And indeed, in the suparachiasmatic region of our hypothalamus reside cells which each act like an oscillator, and together form a coherent circadian rhythm to help our body keep track of time. In fact, such circadian clocks are not limited to mammals but can be found in many organisms including single-cell, reptiles and birds. The study of such rhythms constitutes a field of biology, chronobiology, and forms the background for my research and this thesis.</p><p>Pioneers of chronobiology, Pittendrigh and Aschoff, studied biological clocks from an input-output view, across a range of organisms by observing and analyzing their overt activity in response to stimulus such as light. Their study was made without recourse to knowledge of the biological underpinnings of the circadian pacemaker. The advent of the new biology has now made it possible to "break open the box" and identify biological feedback systems comprised of gene transcription and protein translation as the core mechanism of a biological clock.</p><p>My research has focused on a simple transcription-translation clock model which nevertheless possesses many of the features of a circadian pacemaker including its entrainability by light. This model consists of two nonlinear coupled and delayed differential equations. Light pulses can reset the phase of this clock, whereas constant light of different intensity can speed it up or slow it down. This latter property is a signature property of circadian clocks and is referred to in chronobiology as "Aschoff's rule". The discussion in this thesis focus on develop a connection and also a understanding of how constant light effect this clock model.</p>

Have you thought of why you get tired or why you get hungry? Something in your body keeps track of time. It is almost like you have a clock that tells you all those things. And indeed, in the suparachiasmatic region of our hypothalamus reside cells which each act like an oscillator, and together form a coherent circadian rhythm to help our body keep track of time. In fact, such circadian clocks are not limited to mammals but can be found in many organisms including single-cell, reptiles and birds. The study of such rhythms constitutes a field of biology, chronobiology, and forms the background for my research and this thesis. Pioneers of chronobiology, Pittendrigh and Aschoff, studied biological clocks from an input-output view, across a range of organisms by observing and analyzing their overt activity in response to stimulus such as light. Their study was made without recourse to knowledge of the biological underpinnings of the circadian pacemaker. The advent of the new biology has now made it possible to "break open the box" and identify biological feedback systems comprised of gene transcription and protein translation as the core mechanism of a biological clock. My research has focused on a simple transcription-translation clock model which nevertheless possesses many of the features of a circadian pacemaker including its entrainability by light. This model consists of two nonlinear coupled and delayed differential equations. Light pulses can reset the phase of this clock, whereas constant light of different intensity can speed it up or slow it down. This latter property is a signature property of circadian clocks and is referred to in chronobiology as "Aschoff's rule". The discussion in this thesis focus on develop a connection and also a understanding of how constant light effect this clock model.

A bifurcation analysis is used to investigate the complex dynamics of two heavily loaded single-machine-infinite-busbar power systems modeling the characteristics of the BOARDMAN generator with respect to the rest of the North-Western American Power System and the CHOLLA# generator with respect to the SOWARO station. In the BOARDMAN system, we show that there are three Hopf bifurcations at practical compensation values, while in the CHOLLA#4 system, we show that there is only one Hopf bifurcation. The results show that as the compensation level increases, the operating condition loses stability with a complex conjugate pair of eigenvalues of the Jacobian matrix crossing transversely from the left- to the right-half of the complex plane, signifying a Hopf bifurcation. As a result, the power system oscillates subsynchronously with a small limit-cycle attractor. As the compensation level increases, the limit cycle grows and then loses stability via a secondary Hopf bifurcation, resulting in the creation of a two-period quasiperiodic subsynchronous oscillation, a two-torus attractor. On further increases of the compensation level, the quasiperiodic attractor collides with its basin boundary, resulting in the destruction of the attractor and its basin boundary in a bluesky catastrophe. Consequently, there are no bounded motions. When a damper winding is placed either along the q-axis, or d-axis, or both axes of the BOARDMAN system and the machine saturation is considered in the CHOLLA#4 system, the study shows that, there is only one Hopf bifurcation and it occurs at a much lower level of compensation, indicating that the damper windings and the machine saturation destabilize the system by inducing subsynchronous resonance. Finally, we investigate the effect of linear and nonlinear controllers on mitigating subsynchronous resonance in the CHOLLA#4 system . The study shows that the linear controller increases the compensation level at which subsynchronous resonance occurs and the nonlinear controller does not affect the location and type of the Hopf bifurcation, but it reduces the amplitude of the limit cycle born as a result of the Hopf bifurcation. / Ph. D.