<p>Northern Central America is a tectonically complex zone defined by its borders with Cocos and North America plates. The Middle America subduction zone and the strike-slip motion along the North America-Caribbean plate boundary, in that order, control most of its deformation. The interaction between the different elements of the studied area is evident from the high seismicity in the region, especially along plate boundaries. Also in the interior of the region, seismicity shows that deformation takes place, though in lesser degree. In a time window of 30 years, three earthquakes with moment magnitude larger than 7 struck northern Central America evincing the need to estimate the seismic hazard for the zone. To tackle the problem, we compiled a catalogue of hypocenters commencing in 1964, defined seismogenic sources and described the evolution of earthquake activity through a Poisson model. Probabilistic seismic hazard (PSH) calculations for the next 50 years were performed. The highest estimate of seismic hazard was obtained for the zone adjacent to the subduction zone. Because of the fundamental importance of demarcating seismogenic sources in the PSH analysis, i.e. defining the seismotectonic model, we extended the catalogue to cover 102 years for the whole northern Central America. We have studied the North America-Caribbean plate boundary in order to refine the fault representation. Different techniques were used, like that of body-waveform modeling, allowing us to limit the extent of depth of faulting to 20 km. The seismic moment tensor was used to estimate the deformation velocities on known tectonic structures, including those of the Honduras depression and borderland faults. Finally, we made use of the Coulomb stress criterion to determine the relation between earthquake occurrence and static stress changes following major earthquakes.</p>

A novel method based on pulse current electrodeposition (PCE) employing four different waveforms was developed and utilized for fabricating membrane-electrode assemblies (MEAs) with low platinum loading for use in low-temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells. It was found that both peak deposition current density and duty cycle control the nucleation rate and the growth of platinum crystallites. Based on the combination of parameters used in this study, the optimum conditions for PCE were found to be a peak deposition current density of 400 mA cm-2, a duty cycle of 4%, and a pulse generated and delivered in the microsecond range utilizing a ramp-down waveform. MEAs prepared by PCE using the ramp-down waveform show performance comparable with commercial MEAs that employ ten times the loading of platinum catalyst. The thickness of the pulse electrodeposited catalyst layer is about 5-7 µm, which is ten times thinner than that of commercial state-of-the-art electrodes. MEAs prepared by PCE outperformed commercial MEAs when subjected to a series of steady-state and transient lifetime tests. In steady-state lifetime tests, the average cell voltage over a 3000-h period at a constant current density of 619 mA cm-2 for the in-house and the state-of-the-art MEAs were 564 mV and 505 mV, respectively. In addition, the influence of substrate and carbon powder type, hydrophobic polymer content in the gas diffusion layer, microporous layer loading, and the through-plane gas permeability of different gas diffusion layers on fuel cell performance were investigated and optimized. Finally, two mathematical models based on the microhardness model developed by Molina et al. [J. Molina, B. A. Hoyos, Electrochim. Acta, 54 (2009) 1784-1790] and Milchev [A. Milchev, “Electrocrystallization: Fundamentals of Nucleation And Growth” 2002, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 189-215] were refined and further developed, one based on pure diffusion control and another based on joint diffusion, ohmic and charge transfer control developed by Milchev [A. Milchev, J. Electroanal. Chem., 312 (1991) 267-275 & A. Milchev, Electrochim. Acta, 37 (12) (1992) 2229-2232]. Experimental results validated the above models and a strong correlation between the microhardness and the particle size of the deposited layer was established.

A novel method based on pulse current electrodeposition (PCE) employing four different waveforms was developed and utilized for fabricating membrane-electrode assemblies (MEAs) with low platinum loading for use in low-temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells. It was found that both peak deposition current density and duty cycle control the nucleation rate and the growth of platinum crystallites. Based on the combination of parameters used in this study, the optimum conditions for PCE were found to be a peak deposition current density of 400 mA cm-2, a duty cycle of 4%, and a pulse generated and delivered in the microsecond range utilizing a ramp-down waveform. MEAs prepared by PCE using the ramp-down waveform show performance comparable with commercial MEAs that employ ten times the loading of platinum catalyst. The thickness of the pulse electrodeposited catalyst layer is about 5-7 µm, which is ten times thinner than that of commercial state-of-the-art electrodes. MEAs prepared by PCE outperformed commercial MEAs when subjected to a series of steady-state and transient lifetime tests. In steady-state lifetime tests, the average cell voltage over a 3000-h period at a constant current density of 619 mA cm-2 for the in-house and the state-of-the-art MEAs were 564 mV and 505 mV, respectively. In addition, the influence of substrate and carbon powder type, hydrophobic polymer content in the gas diffusion layer, microporous layer loading, and the through-plane gas permeability of different gas diffusion layers on fuel cell performance were investigated and optimized. Finally, two mathematical models based on the microhardness model developed by Molina et al. [J. Molina, B. A. Hoyos, Electrochim. Acta, 54 (2009) 1784-1790] and Milchev [A. Milchev, “Electrocrystallization: Fundamentals of Nucleation And Growth” 2002, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 189-215] were refined and further developed, one based on pure diffusion control and another based on joint diffusion, ohmic and charge transfer control developed by Milchev [A. Milchev, J. Electroanal. Chem., 312 (1991) 267-275 & A. Milchev, Electrochim. Acta, 37 (12) (1992) 2229-2232]. Experimental results validated the above models and a strong correlation between the microhardness and the particle size of the deposited layer was established.

Speech communication encompasses diverse types of information, including phonetics, affective state, voice quality, and speaker identity. From a speech production standpoint, the acoustic speech signal can be mainly divided into glottal source and vocal tract components, which play distinct roles in rendering the various types of information it contains. Most deployed speech analysis systems, however, do not explicitly represent these two components as distinct entities, as their joint estimation from the acoustic speech signal becomes an ill-defined blind deconvolution problem. Nevertheless, because of the desire to understand glottal behavior and how it relates to perceived voice quality, there has been continued interest in explicitly estimating the glottal component of the speech signal. To this end, several inverse filtering (IF) algorithms have been proposed, but they are unreliable in practice because of the blind formulation of the separation problem. In an effort to develop a method that can bypass the challenging IF process, this thesis proposes a new glottal source information extraction method that relies on supervised machine learning to transform smoothed spectral representations of speech, which are already used in some of the most widely deployed and successful speech analysis applications, into a set of glottal source features. A transformation method based on Gaussian mixture regression (GMR) is presented and compared to current IF methods in terms of feature similarity, reliability, and speaker discrimination capability on a large speech corpus, and potential representations of the spectral envelope of speech are investigated for their ability represent glottal source variation in a predictable manner. The proposed system was found to produce glottal source features that reasonably matched their IF counterparts in many cases, while being less susceptible to spurious errors. The development of the proposed method entailed a study into the aspects of glottal source information that are already contained within the spectral features commonly used in speech analysis, yielding an objective assessment regarding the expected advantages of explicitly using glottal information extracted from the speech signal via currently available IF methods, versus the alternative of relying on the glottal source information that is implicitly contained in spectral envelope representations.

We introduce a mathematical framework for the inverse medium problem arising commonly in geotechnical site characterization and geophysical probing applications, when stress waves are used to probe the material composition of the interrogated medium. Specifically, we attempt to recover the spatial distribution of Lame's parameters ( and μ) of an elastic semi-infinite arbitrarily heterogeneous medium, using surface measurements of the medium's response to prescribed dynamic excitations. The focus is on characterizing near-surface deposits, and to this end, we develop a method that is implemented directly in the time-domain, is driven by the full waveform response collected at receivers on the surface, while the domain of interest is truncated using Perfectly-Matched-Layers (PMLs) to limit the originally semi-infinite extent of the physical domain. There are two key issues associated with the problem at hand: (a) the forward problem, namely the numerical simulation of the wave motion in the domain of interest; and (b) the framework and strategies for tackling the inverse problem. To address the forward problem, it is necessary that the domain of interest be truncated, and the resulting finite domain be forced to mimic the physics of the original problem: to this end, we introduce unsplit-field PMLs, and develop and implement two new formulations, one fully-mixed and one hybrid (mixed coupled with a non-mixed approach) that model wave motion within the, now PML-truncated, domain. To address the inverse problem, we adopt a partial-differential-equation-constrained optimization framework that results in the usual triplet of an initial-and-boundary-value forward problem, a final-and-boundary-value adjoint problem, and a time-independent boundary-value control problem. This triplet of boundary-value-problems is used to guide the optimizer to the target profile of the spatially distributed Lame parameters. Given the multiplicity of solutions, we assist the optimizer, by deploying regularization schemes, continuation schemes (regularization factor and source-frequency content), as well as a physics-driven simple procedure to bias the search directions. We report numerical examples attesting to the quality, stability, and efficiency of the forward wave modeling. We also report moderate success with numerical experiments targeting inversion of both smooth and sharp profiles in two dimensions. / text

The wireless transfer of power is the enabling technology for realizing a true internet-of-things. Broad sensor networks capable of monitoring environmental pollutants, health-related biological data, and building utility usage are just a small fraction of the myriad of applications which are part of an ever evolving ubiquitous lifestyle. Realizing these systems requires a means of powering their electronics sans batteries. Removing the batteries from the billions or trillions of these envisioned devices not only reduces their size and lowers their cost, but also avoids an ecological catastrophe. Increasing the efficiency of microwave-to-DC power conversion in energy-harvesting circuits extends the range and reliability of passive sensor networks. Multi-frequency waveforms are one technique that assists in overcoming the energy-harvesting circuit diode voltage threshold which limit the energy-conversion efficiency at low RF input powers typically encountered by sensors at the fringe of their coverage area. This thesis discusses a systematic optimization approach to the design of energy-conversion circuits along with multi-frequency waveform excitation. Using this methodology, a low-power 5.8 GHz rectenna showed an output power improvement of over 20 dB at -20 dBm input power using a 3-POW (power-optimized waveform) compared to continuous waveforms (CW). The resultant efficiency is the highest reported efficiency for low-power 5.8 GHz energy harvesters. Additionally, new theoretical models help to predict the maximum possible range of the next generation of passive electronics based upon trends in the semiconductor industry. These models predict improvements in diode turn-on power of over 20 dB using modern Schottky diodes. This improvement in turn-on power includes an improvement in output power of hundreds of dB when compared to CW.

This dissertation presents a study on velocity modeling using ocean-bottom seismometer data (OBS) collected in 2004 and 2006 on the western Scotian slope. Gas hydrate and free gas concentrations and their distribution along the Scotian margin were derived based on the velocity results modeled with two different OBS data sets. A strong velocity increase (140-300 m/s) associated with gas hydrate was modeled for a depth of 220 m below seafloor (bsf). At the base of that high velocity zone (330 mbsf) the velocity decreases with 50-130 m/s. This depth is associated with the depth of the bottom-simulating reflector (BSR) observed in previous 2-D seismic reflection data. The gas hydrate concentrations (2-18 %) based on these velocities were calculated with an effective medium model. The velocity modeling shows that a sparser OBS spacing (~ 1 km) reveals more velocity uncertainties and smaller velocity contrasts than a denser (100 m) spaced OBS array. The results of the travel-time inverse modeling are applied in a waveform inverse modeling with OBS data in the second part of the thesis. The modeling tests were performed to obtain information on OBS instrument spacings necessary to detect low-concentration gas hydrate occurrences. The model runs show that an increase in instrument spacing leads to an increasing loss of model smoothness. However, large instrument spacings (>500 m) are beneficial for covering a wide target region with only using a few instruments, but decreasing the lateral resolution limits of the subsurface targets. In general half of the instrument spacing defines the lower boundary for the lateral width of the target structure. Waveform modeling with the 2006 OBS data has shown that low frequencies (<8 Hz) in the source spectrum are necessary to recover the background velocity of the model. The starting model derived from travel-time inversion of the 2006 data is not close enough to the true model. Thus the first-arrival waveforms do not match within half a cycle. Modeling with a starting frequency of 8 Hz and and applying data with a low signal-to-noise ratio (1.25) introduces artifacts into the final model result without updating the velocity. / Graduate

This work is specialized on long - term monitoring, putting down and evaluationing parameters of bodily growth on instances of individual-growth waveforms in a group of children. For experimental part of this work was provided childrens metering, both sex, on four primary schools in České Budějovice and in the surrounding. Data were extracted in terms of research in years 1997- 2006. In the scope of my diploma work I took the part in this metering in years 2004 - 2006. Repeatedly was observed a group of 110 children, from that 52 boys and 58 girls. The measuring was concerned with 29 somatometrics characteristics, three of these were chosen and are the basis of this work. They are its stature, height in sitting and iliospinale spot level - longitude of upper limb.

La 5ème génération de réseaux mobiles (5G), actuellement en cours de standardisation, prévoit de nouveaux scénarios de communication dans l’évolution vers un monde entièrement connecté et communicant. Dans ce contexte, un nombre très important de techniques avancées sont en cours d’exploration pour répondre aux nombreux défis imposés en termes de débit, de latence, de consommation énergétique, et de capacité à faire communiquer entre eux, efficacement, des milliards d'objets très différents. Parmi les techniques les plus prometteuses de la couche physique, de nouvelles formes d'ondes multiporteuses filtrées sont proposées. Bien qu’elles offrent un meilleur confinement spectral et une meilleure localisation en temps et en fréquence par rapport à l’OFDM de la 4G, elles présentent des limitations soit en termes de complexité soit en termes de performance et d’intégration. De plus, ces formes d’ondes sont évaluées d’un point de vue théorique et les résultats ne sont pas toujours validés sur des plateformes matérielles de preuve de concept reproduisant les conditions réelles des scénarios de la 5G.Dans ce contexte, les travaux de cette thèse proposent plusieurs contributions originales aussi bien au niveau algorithmes de traitement qu’au niveau architectures matérielles. Dans le domaine algorithmique,les travaux réalisés ont mené aux contributions suivantes : (1) Un nouveau filtre prototype court est proposé pour la forme d’onde FBMC/OQAM. Des analyses analytiques, complétées par simulation,montrent que le filtre proposé permet d’améliorer la résistance aux erreurs de synchronisation temporel et de réduire la complexité du récepteur FBMC de type « frequency-spread » comparé aux autres filtres de la littérature, (2) Un nouveau type de récepteur FBMC adapté pour les filtres courts est proposé. Ce récepteur a la particularité d’améliorer sensiblement la résistance aux canaux doublement dispersifs pour des filtres courts, et de supporter les communications asynchrones, (3) Un émetteur UF-OFDM original de complexité significativement réduite par rapport à la littérature est proposé. Contrairement aux techniques existantes, l’émetteur proposé n’introduit aucune approximation dans le signal généré, et préserve ainsi le confinement spectral de la forme d’onde. Dans le domaine de la conception matérielle, les travaux réalisés durant cette thèse ont mené aux contributions suivantes : (4) Une architecture matérielle optimisée des émetteurs FBMC et UF-OFDM de complexité comparable à OFDM, (5) Une architecture matérielle optimisée de l’étage de filtrage du récepteur FBMC « frequency-spread », avec une complexité comparable à celle d’un récepteur « polyphase-network », et (6) Une des premières plateformes matérielles de preuve de concept de la 5G, pouvant évaluer les performances des formes d’ondes pour les différents services de la 5G. / The 5th generation of mobile communications is fore seen to cope with a high degree of heterogeneity in terms of services: enhanced mobile broadband, massive machine, vehicular and mission critical communications, broadcast services. Consequently, diverse and often contradicting key performance indicators need to be supported, such as high capacity/user-rates, low latency, high mobility, massive number of devices, low cost and low power consumption. 4G is not designed to efficiently meet such a high degree of heterogeneity: the OFDM waveform exhibits several limitations in terms of spectrum usage and robustness to frequency and timing synchronization errors. In order to overcome these limitations and to cope with the new 5G requirements,several research initiatives have been conducted to design new waveforms. Proposed candidates, such as FBMC/OQAM or UF-OFDM,are mainly based on multicarrier modulation with specific filtering scheme used on the top of the OFDM basis. However, most of the proposed new waveforms are often studied and analyzed at the algorithmic level considering mainly the quality of the communication link. Therefore, the investigation of low-complexity implementations and the availability of real hardware prototypes are of high interest for performance validation and proof-of-concept of the diverse proposed communication techniques. In the above context, this thesis work proposes several original contributions in the algorithm and the hardware design domains. In the algorithm domain, this work leads to the following contributions: (1) Anovel short prototype filter for FBMC allowing for near perfectreconstruction and having the same size as one OFDM symbol is proposed. Using the Frequency Spread implementation for the FBMC receiver, analytical studies and simulation results show that the proposed filter exhibits better robustness to several types of channel impairments when compared to state-of-the-art short prototype filters and OFDM modulation. (2) A novel FBMC receiver technique suitable for short filters is proposed. This receiver enables to greatly improve the robustness against double dispersive channels for short filters, and enables the support of asynchronous communications, (3) A novel low complexityUF-OFDM transmitter without any signal quality loss isproposed. For small subband sizes, the complexity becomescomparable to OFDM regardless of the number of allocated subbands.In the hardware design domain, this thesis work leads to the following contributions: (4) An efficient pipelined hardware architecture of the FBMC/OQAM transmitter capable of supporting several filter lengths and targeting low complexity is proposed and compared to typical FBMC/OQAM and OFDM implementations, (5) An optimized frequency spread based hardware architecture of the filtering stage is proposed for the designed short prototype filter, showing lower complexity than the classical Poly Phase-Network-based implementation, (6) One of the first flexible and efficient hardware platforms for 5G waveform design, allowing the support of several communication scenarios as foreseen in 5G.

Support of many different services, approximately 1000x increase of current data rates, ultra-reliability, low latency and energy/cost efficiency are among the demands from upcoming 5G standard. In order to meet them, researchers investigate various potential technologies involving different network layers and discuss their trade-offs for possible 5G scenarios. Waveform design is a critical part of these efforts and various alternatives have been heavily discussed over the last few years. Besides that, wireless technology is expected to be deployed in many critical applications including the ones involving with daily life activities, health-care and vehicular traffic. Therefore, security of wireless systems is also crucial for a reliable and confidential deployment. In order to achieve these goals in future wireless systems, physical layer (PHY) algorithms play a vital role not only in waveform design but also for improving security. In this dissertation, we draft the ongoing activities in PHY in terms of waveform design and security for providing spectrally efficient and reliable services considering various scenarios, and present our algorithms in this direction. Regarding the waveform design, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is mostly considered as the base scheme since it is the dominant technology in many existing standards and is also considered for 5G new radio. We specifically propose two approaches for the improvement of OFDM in terms of out-of-band emission and peak to average power ratio. We also present how the requirements of different 5G RAN scenarios reflect on waveform parameters and explore the motivations behind designing advanced frames that include multiple waveforms with different parameters, referred to as numerologies by the 3GPP community, as well as the problems that arise with such coexistence. On the security aspect, we firstly consider broadband communication scenarios and propose practical security approaches that suppress the cyclic features of OFDM and single carrier-frequency domain equalization based waveforms and remove their vulnerability to the eavesdropping attacks. Additionally, an authentication mechanism in PHY is presented for wireless implantable medical devices. Thus, we address the security issues for two critical wireless communication scenarios in PHY to contribute a confidential and reliable deployment of wireless technologies in the near future.