The paradigm of drug discovery have been to find the strongest possible binder to the target by high-throughput screening (HTS) but high affinity interactions are related to low kinetic off rates and thus result in severe side-effects and non-approved drugs. Lead molecules working in a transient manner (KD > µM) will allow for rapid off rates and possibly less side-effects. In this study the peak profile method applied to weak affinity chromatography (WAC) was evaluated as a simple way to provide the kinetics of the interaction and thereby allowing for high-throughput determinations. In the peak profile formula all band-broadening effects except the stationary mass transfer is subtracted which simplifies the calculations for the kinetics of the interaction tremendously. The technique was evaluated by screening of 3 different benzamidines at 3 linear flow-rates using zonal chromatography and human α-thrombin as immobilized target protein. The kinetics of the interaction could unfortunately not be determined. This was possibly due to the flow-rates not being high enough as indicated by a low critical ratio (η < 1). Higher flow-rates would increase the contribution to band-broadening due to kinetic effects but would also require more precise estimation of peak variance.

This paper examines the oil price-macro economy relationship by means of analyzing the impact ofoil price on Industrial production, real effective exchange rate, long term interest rate and inflation rate for a sample of ten OECD countries using quarterly data for the period 1970q1-2011q1.The impact of oil price shock on industrial production is negative and occurs with a lag of one year. However, the impact has weakened considerably compared to the 1970s. The impact on real effective exchange rate is negative/positive for a net importer/exporter, and the magnitude of the shock depends on the county´s share of net import/export of total world demand/supply. Interest rates are affected negatively, through increase in inflation rates following the oil price shock. The effect tends to die out after 5-8 quarters following the shock for most of the variables and countries. This paper also applies alternative methods to test for unit root and cointegration, which takes into account for structural breaks in the data. The weakness of Phillips-Peron test is clearly demonstrated in the case of inflation rates and interest rates, where the test falsely considered the series to be non-stationary when they in fact are stationary around a structural break. There is also strong evidence of cointegration between oil price and inflation rates and between oil price and interest rates, especially when taking account for structural breaks. / This study also highlights the relevance of oil scarcity and oil peak theory. It is shown that these two terms should receive more attention than they have received so far as more oilexporters have reached their production peaks and more are likely to be followed. According to the data, renewable source of energy are not likely to dominate OECD countries energy mix in the short term, instead, there is a trend of increasing natural gas consumption among most of OECD countries. Natural gas markets are likely to play an equal role in the future as oil markets do today. The dilemma that importing countries are facing today, particularly in Europe, is whether to expose their markets to Russia or to the Middle East.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become a popular modulation method in high-speed wireless communications. By partitioning a wideband fading channel into flat narrowband channels, OFDM is able to mitigate the detrimental effects of multipath fading using a simple one-tap equalizer. However, in the time domain OFDM signals suffer from large envelope variations, which are often characterized by the peak-to-average ratio (PAR). High PAR signals, like OFDM, require that transmission amplifiers operate at very low power efficiencies to avoid clipping. In this thesis we review the most popular OFDM PAR-reduction techniques and demonstrate that selected mapping (SLM) is a particularly promising reduction technique. In a SLM system, an OFDM symbol is mapped to a set of quasi-independent equivalent symbols and then the lowest-PAR symbol is selected for transmission. The tradeoff for PAR reduction in SLM is computational complexity as each mapping requires an additional inverse fast fourier transform (IFFT) operation in the transmitter. In additional to an overview of current SLM work, we present a thorough analysis of SLM as well as several novel SLM proposals. First, we derive the closed-form expression for the expected PAR in an SLM system. The expected PAR can be thought of as a metric of PAR reduction capability. Second, we provide a power analysis of SLM to determine if the computational power costs outweigh the power saved through PAR reduction. Through this analysis, we show that SLM is capable of several Watts of net power savings when used in a wireless transmission system. Third, we propose that a PAR threshold should be set in SLM. Such thresholding leads to significant complexity decreases. Fourth, we derive the maximum likelihood (ML) and maximum extit{a posteriori} (MAP) detection metrics for blind SLM (BSLM) and threshold BSLM respectively. Lastly, we demonstrate that by using monomial phase sequences in SLM blind phase sequence detection is possible with a single FFT operation in the receiver.

High peak to average power ratio (PAPR) is one of the major drawbacks in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In recently years, various methods have been proposed to reduce the PAPR performance. The selected mapping (SLM) scheme is perhaps the most popular one because it provides outstanding PAPR reduction performance. In addition, the subcarrier magnitude remains the same in the SLM scheme. However, there are two major shortcomings in the SLM scheme. First of all, it requires a number of inverse fast Fourier transforms (IFFTs) to produce candidate signals, dramatically increasing the computational complexity. In addition, side information has to be transmitted to the receiver to indicate the candidate signal that results in the best PAPR, leading to the decrease in bandwidth utilization. To overcome these two drawbacks, this thesis proposes a novel SLM scheme that does not need side information. The proposed scheme is based on a low complexity SLM scheme [C.-P. Li, S.-H. Wang, and C.-L. Wang, ¡§Novel low-complexity SLM schemes for PAPR reduction in OFDM systems,¡¨ IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 58, no. 5, pp. 2916¡V2921, May 2010] in pilot-aided OFDM system. Simulation experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed scheme. It is shown that the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme is very similar to that of the traditional SLM scheme with perfect knowledge of the side information. Therefore, the proposed scheme not only has the advantages of low complexity and high bandwidth utilization, but also has a superior BER performance.

Because of the shortage of domestic energy resources in Taiwan, more than 97% of the energy has to be imported. The energy price has been increased dramatically during recent years due to the limited supply of conventional primary fossil energy resources. With the economic development and upgrade of people living standard, the electricity power consumption is increased significantly. To solve the problem, different strategies of energy conservation and CO2 emission reduction have been promoted by government to reduce that the peak loading growth and achieve better usage of electricity with more effective load management. This thesis proposes a digital smart meter which integrates the energy metering IC, microprocessor and hybrid communication schemes (Power Line Carrier/ZigBee/RS-485). The load control module and communication module are included in the smart meter to support various application functions. The embedded power management system (PMS) is also proposed to integrate with the smart meter to perform the demand response according to the real-time pricing and load management for residential and commercial customers. The master station can supervise the real-time power consumption of various load components to analyze the power consumption model of customers served and execute the demand load control. The actual demonstration system of embedded PMS has been set up to verify the function of energy management so that the customers have better understanding of power consumption by each appliance. In the future, the implementation of intelligent load control with an emergency load shedding of capability can help utility companies to achieve virtual power generation to enhance the power systems reliability. The customers may also reduce the electricity charge by executing demand response function, which disconnects the electricity service for non essential loads for either system emergency or high electricity peak pricing

High peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) is a serious drawback in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Various methods have been proposed to reduce PAPR, active constellation extension (ACE) scheme has excellent performance. There are two schemes were proposed in traditional ACE, the one of which is ACE-Smart Gradient-Project (SGP) which can significantly reduce PAPR through first iteration. In fact, optimal solution is not obtained in ACE-SGP, we find the scheme can be formulated as convex optimization problem, that is, we can find out optimal solution to minimize PAPR by convex optimization algorithm. Two proposed schemes are based on two low complexity schemes, respectively, and they were proved to satisfy convex optimization problem. Although the power of transmission and complexity of optimization algorithm in the proposed schemes are higher than that of the traditional ACE-SGP scheme, but proposed schemes has proper improvement in PAPR reduction.

Due to the technology development, the diet habit has completely changed. It accompanied by the metabolite diseases relevant to blood glucose and lipids, which are dependent with the atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. In this study, we using matrix assisted laser desorption ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF/MS) to characterize triglycerides in human plasma. In the other, the glycosylated hemoglobin in human whole blood was detected by liquid electrospray laser desorption ionization (Liquid ELDI/MS). Triglycerides are energy source (9 kcal/g) in human body, derived from glycerol and three fatty acids. It is a main constituent of vegetable oil and animal fats. In clinical diagnosis, human plasma was mixed with triglyceride Kit to react to the final 520 nm UV-absorbing substance, then the concentration was quantified consistent with the calibration line by UV/Visible spectrometry. By the way, it needed Kit chemicals for one trial. MALDI-TOF/MS is a simple and easy method to operate to detect complex compounds in human plasma, only need to optimize the parameters (solvent collection, sample dilution, matrix selection, sample pretreatment ) to form a homogeneous crystals. The developed ¡§seed layer¡¨ method can reduce the sweet spot effect and cause a lower with-in spot variation (RSD < 20%) compared to ¡§premix¡¨ method (RSD >30%). Combined with statistic software 2D peak distribution, a semi-quantification can be observe of 24 different triglyceride concentration human plasmas. The level of glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) in whole blood is currently the most important measurement of long-term control of the glycemic state of diabetes. As a result of the interferences of high concentrations of metabolites, proteins and salts in whole blood, tedious sample cleanup procedures must be performed prior to subjecting the sample solutions to conventional LC/MS and MALDI analyses for the detection of HbA1c. Electrospray laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry (ELDI/MS), a two-step ambient ionization technique, has been developed to characterize analytes directly from the liquid sample surface. One drop of the diluted hole blood (1/10, v/v in water) was placed on the stainless steel plate. The sample droplet was irradiated with a pulse laser, the desorbed analytes were post-ionized in an electrospray (ESI) plume (ESI solution: 70% methanol in water, 0.1% acetic acid), and the analyte ions were detected by a ion trap mass analyzer. Through this study, the protocol for efficiently characterizing HbA1c present in a drop of diluted whole blood with ELDI/MS was established. We successfully detected the ion signal of HbA1c with ELDI/MS. Quantification of the level of HbA1c in the whole blood of diabetic patients was achieved by calculating the ratio of the ion peak area of the glycosylated and non-glycosylated hemoglobin ions. A linear relationship exists for the quantitative results of HbA1c in whole blood of 20 diabetic patients obtained between ELDI/MS and that through conventional spectroscopic measurement.

This thesis proposes a dB-linear programmable variable gain amplifier (VGA) and a voltage peak detector with digital calibration for FPW-based antibody sensing system. In the first topic, a dB-linear programmable variable gain amplifier is proposed. By using two source followers as the input terminals, input signals with very low DC offset could be received. The linear local-feedback transconductors are employed to be trans-condurctor-stage and load-stage. Besides, a reconfiguration method is used to reduce the layout area and improve the linearity of the gain to attain gain error less than 0.86 dB measured on silicon. In the second topic, a voltage peak detector with digital calibration is proposed. The voltage peak of the input sine-wave signal is sampled and held by using an integra-tor, a digital-to-analog converter, and a voltage comparator to generate a square-wave signal. Besides, the voltage error caused by the propagation delay could be calibrated by the proposed digital calibration method. The frequency of input signal is up to 20 MHz and the voltage error is justified to be less than 0.81 % by simulations.

The main subject of this thesis is to design a voltage peak detector for FPW-based IgE measurement systems. Therefore, two different peak detectors are proposed. The first voltage peak detector basically samples the input signal twice (double sampling) to reduce the ripples appearing during the sample and hold modes. This voltage peak detector also resolves the detection error of conventional voltage peak detectors when they are used to detect the output signal of FPW-based biosensors.The fastest signal which this voltage peak detector can detect is 10 MHz. The second voltage peak detector is composed of a coupling capacitor, an unity gain buffer, an 8th order voltage control voltage source(VCVS) low pass filter, and a non-inverting amplifier. The major difference of this design from the previous one is to filter and amplify the input signal. The specification requirements of the operational transconductance amplifier in this voltage peak detector can be relaxed thereafter. The resolution and performance of the sensing system are also improved. By replacing the conventional power MOS by a non-inverting amplifier, the charging time is reduced and over charge hazard is avoided. Besides, the speed of the entire system is enhanced. The fastest signal which this voltage peak detector can detect is 50 MHz and the precision is 0.357 %.

Gas production from low-permeability (tight) gas sandstones is increasingly important in the USA as conventional gas reservoirs are being depleted, and its importance will increase worldwide in future decades. Travis Peak tight sandstones have produced gas since the 1940s. In this study, well log, 2D seismic, core, and production data were used to evaluate the geologic setting and reservoir characteristics of the Travis Peak formation. The primary objective was to assess the potential for basinward extension of Travis Peak gas production along the west margin of the East Texas Basin. Along the west margin of the East Texas Basin, southeast-trending Travis Peak sandstones belts were deposited by the Ancestral Red River fluvial-deltaic system. The sandstones are fine-grained, moderately well sorted, subangular to subrounded, quartz arenites and subarkoses; reservoir quality decreases with depth, primarily due to diagenetic quartz overgrowths. Evaluation of drilling mud densities suggests that strata deeper than 12,500 ft may be overpressured. Assessment of the geothermal gradient (1.6 °F/100 ft) indicates that overpressure may be relict, resulting from hydrocarbon generation by Smackover and Bossier formation potential source rocks. In the study area, Travis Peak cumulative gas production was 1.43 trillion cubic feet from January 1, 1961, through December 31, 2005. Mean daily gas production from 923 wells was 925,000 cubic ft/well/day, during the best year of production. The number of Travis Peak gas wells in “high-cost” (tight sandstone) fields increased from 18 in the decade 1966-75 to 333 in the decade 1996-2005, when high-cost fields accounted for 33.2% of the Travis Peak gas production. However, 2005 gas production from high cost fields accounted for 63.2% of the Travis Peak total production, indicating that production from high-cost gas wells has increased markedly. Along the west margin of the East Texas Basin, hydrocarbon occurs in structural, stratigraphic, and combination traps associated with salt deformation. Downdip extension of Travis Peak production will depend on the (1) burial history and diagenesis, (2) reservoir sedimentary facies, and (3) structural setting. Potential Travis Peak hydrocarbon plays include: updip pinch-outs of sandstones; sandstone pinch-outs at margins of salt-withdrawal basins; domal traps above salt structures; and deepwater sands.