Hydrogenated amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC:H) can provide exceptional surface passivation essential for high-efficiency crystalline silicon solar cells. This thesis reports on the fundamental study of a-SiC:H films deposited using a novel deposition technique, DC saddle field PECVD, in contrast to the conventional industrial use of RF-PECVD. The growth conditions were optimized and correlated with passivating, structural, and optical characteristics. The lifetime has a strong dependency on deposition temperature and improves by over two orders of magnitude as the temperature increases; the maximum lifetime achieved in this work reached 0.5 ms. In addition, the Tauc optical gap can be increased from 1.7 eV to 2.3 eV by varying the precursor gas mixture ratio. Post-deposition annealing experiments demonstrate thermal stability of the samples deposited at 250 °C and in some instances shows improvement in passivation quality by a factor of two with a one-step annealing treatment at 300 °C for 15 minutes.

Abstract Silicon carbide is a versatile material amenable to variety of applications from electrical insulation to surface passivation, diffusion-barrier in optoelectronic and high-frequency devices. This research presents a fundamental study of a-SiC:H films with variable stoichiometries deposited using novel technique, DC saddle-field plasma-enhanced chemical-vapour deposition, a departure from conventional RF PECVD commonly used in industry. DCSF PECVD is an alternative technique for low temperature large area deposition. Stoichiometric a-SiC:H obtained by fine-tuning precursor gas mixture. Annealing up to 800oC showed no significant change in elemental composition; particularly indicating thermal stability at stoichiometry. Ellipsometry showed wide range of optical gaps whose maximum surpasses values reported in literature. Refractive index measured and change in values studied as function of increasing carbon content in the films. Also attainment of very smooth surface morphology for stoichiometric a-SiC:H films reported. Surface roughness of 1 nm rms demonstrated for films grown at temperature as low as 225oC.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Uppsala : Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, 2008. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

: In this thesis, capacitive textile pressure sensors have been developed. The sensors were meant to be integrated into saddle pads and be able to measure the pressure between the saddle and horse. The aim of the thesis was to create a theoretical and practical based map on how a textile pressure sensor can be made. Capacitance was found to be the most suitable pressure sensitive technique to be implemented in a textile structure. The project was divided into two cycles, where the first cycle consisted of laminating capacitive textile pressure sensors of readymade fabrics in different thicknesses and sizes. After testing the pressure sensitivity of these laminates, it was concluded that a thin fabric with some compressibility was sufficient for making a textile capacitive pressure sensor. However, the area cannot be too small. The second cycle consisted of weaving capacitive pressure sensors as three layer structures. The pressure sensitivity of the sensors and the effect of moisture were tested. The results showed that most of the woven sensors were able to sense a 50g change in weight even after a 700g load was put on. The moisture and water tests showed that the pressure sensors must be protected from water and moisture. It was also discovered that there is a lack of knowledge in how textile structures and fibres behave under compression and release. Models of how textiles behave during pressure are needed to do correct transformations between compression and pressure and predict how the textile will behave during different pressures. / Program: Masterutbildning i textilteknik

Title: The influence of bicycle saddle position on muscle tone of the triceps surae muscle Objectives: The aim of this thesis is to find out what is the effect of changing the bicycle saddle position on muscle tone of triceps surae muscle. And whether the higher seat position will also increase muscle tone of the calf muscle. Methods: The thesis is divided into the theoretical part, where there is the information from the scientific literature on the subject and a practical part. The theoretical part includes anatomical descriptions and rheological properties of skeletal muscles, muscle tension and its regulation. Part of it is also the biomechanics of cycling, bike geometry and the options of bicycle seat setting and also the risk implications of the incorrect bicycle seat position. The practical part was prepared as a research by measuring of muscle tone by the myotonometer. For measurement was used the triceps surae muscle of the seven probands on the dominant lower limb. The measurement were twice two weeks apart with the different bicycle seat height. Results: The measurement results confirmed that change of bicycle saddle position has an influence on the muscle tone and that the higher saddle position will also increase muscle tone of the calf muscle. Keywords: bicycle saddle position, saddle...

This dissertation was to study computational theory and methods for ?nding multiple saddle critical points in Banach spaces. Two local minimax methods were developed for this purpose. One was for unconstrained cases and the other was for constrained cases. First, two local minmax characterization of saddle critical points in Banach spaces were established. Based on these two local minmax characterizations, two local minimax algorithms were designed. Their ?ow charts were presented. Then convergence analysis of the algorithms were carried out. Under certain assumptions, a subsequence convergence and a point-to-set convergence were obtained. Furthermore, a relation between the convergence rates of the functional value sequence and corresponding gradient sequence was derived. Techniques to implement the algorithms were discussed. In numerical experiments, those techniques have been successfully implemented to solve for multiple solutions of several quasilinear elliptic boundary value problems and multiple eigenpairs of the well known nonlinear p-Laplacian operator. Numerical solutions were presented by their pro?les for visualization. Several interesting phenomena of the solutions of quasilinear elliptic boundary value problems and the eigenpairs of the p-Laplacian operator have been observed and are open for further investigation. As a generalization of the above results, nonsmooth critical points were considered for locally Lipschitz continuous functionals. A local minmax characterization of nonsmooth saddle critical points was also established. To establish its version in Banach spaces, a new notion, pseudo-generalized-gradient has to be introduced. Based on the characterization, a local minimax algorithm for ?nding multiple nonsmooth saddle critical points was proposed for further study.

This dissertation was to study computational theory and methods for ?nding multiple saddle critical points in Banach spaces. Two local minimax methods were developed for this purpose. One was for unconstrained cases and the other was for constrained cases. First, two local minmax characterization of saddle critical points in Banach spaces were established. Based on these two local minmax characterizations, two local minimax algorithms were designed. Their ?ow charts were presented. Then convergence analysis of the algorithms were carried out. Under certain assumptions, a subsequence convergence and a point-to-set convergence were obtained. Furthermore, a relation between the convergence rates of the functional value sequence and corresponding gradient sequence was derived. Techniques to implement the algorithms were discussed. In numerical experiments, those techniques have been successfully implemented to solve for multiple solutions of several quasilinear elliptic boundary value problems and multiple eigenpairs of the well known nonlinear p-Laplacian operator. Numerical solutions were presented by their pro?les for visualization. Several interesting phenomena of the solutions of quasilinear elliptic boundary value problems and the eigenpairs of the p-Laplacian operator have been observed and are open for further investigation. As a generalization of the above results, nonsmooth critical points were considered for locally Lipschitz continuous functionals. A local minmax characterization of nonsmooth saddle critical points was also established. To establish its version in Banach spaces, a new notion, pseudo-generalized-gradient has to be introduced. Based on the characterization, a local minimax algorithm for ?nding multiple nonsmooth saddle critical points was proposed for further study.

This dissertation considers the composite saddle-point (CSP) problem which is motivated by real-world applications in the areas of machine learning and image processing. Two new accelerated algorithms for solving composite saddle-point problems are introduced. Due to the two-block structure of the CSP problem, it can be solved by any algorithm belonging to the block-decomposition hybrid proximal extragradient (BD-HPE) framework. The framework consists of a family of inexact proximal point methods for solving a general two-block structured monotone inclusion problem which, at every iteration, solves two prox sub-inclusions according to a certain relative error criterion. By exploiting the fact that the two prox sub-inclusions in the context of the CSP problem are equivalent to two composite convex programs, the first part of this dissertation proposes a new instance of the BD-HPE framework that approximately solves them using an accelerated gradient method. It is shown that this new instance has better iteration-complexity than the previous ones. The second part of this dissertation introduces a new algorithm for solving a special class of CSP problems. The new algorithm is a special instance of the hybrid proximal extragradient (HPE) framework in which a Nesterov's accelerated variant is used to approximately solve the prox subproblems. One of the advantages of the this method is that it works for any constant choice of proximal stepsize. Moreover, a suitable choice of the latter stepsize yields a method with the best known (accelerated inner) iteration complexity for the aforementioned class of saddle-point problems. Experiment results on both synthetic CSP problems and real-world problems show that the two method significantly outperform several state-of-the-art algorithms.

In this thesis uniform asymptotic approximations of integrals are discussed. In order to derive these approximations, two well-known methods are used i.e., the saddle point method and the Bleistein method. To start with this, examples are given to demonstrate these two methods and a general idea of how to approach these techniques. The asymptotics of the hypergeometric functions with large parameters are discussed i.e., 2F1 (a + e1λ, b + e2λ c + e3λ ; z)where ej = 0,±1, j = 1, 2, 3 as |λ|→ ∞, which are valid in large regions of the complex z-plane, where a, b and c are fixed. The saddle point method is applied where the saddle point gives a dominant contributions to the integral representations of the hypergeometric functions and Bleistein’s method is adopted to obtain the uniform asymptotic approximations of some cases where the coalescence takes place between the critical points of the integrals. As a special case, the uniform asymptotic approximation of the hypergeometric function where the third parameter is large, is obtained. A new method to estimate the remainder term in the Bleistein method is proposed which is created to deal with new type of integrals in which the usual methods for the remainder estimates fail. Finally, using the asymptotic property of the hypergeometric function when the third parameter is large, the uniform asymptotic approximation of the monic Meixner Sobolev polynomials Sn(x) as n → ∞ , is obtained in terms of Airy functions. The asymptotic approximations for the location of the zeros of these polynomials are also discussed. As a limit case, a new asymptotic approximation for the large zeros of the classical Meixner polynomials is provided.

<p>We investigate mathematical tools, Edgeworth series expansion and the saddle point method, which are approximation techniques that help us to estimate the distribution function for the standardized mean of independent identical distributed random variables where we will take into consideration the lattice case. Later on we will describe one important application for these mathematical tools where game developing companies can use them to reduce the amount of time needed to satisfy their standard requests before they approve any game</p>