Engineering Commons^™

Novel Control Of Pv Solar And Wind Farm Inverters As Statcom For Increasing Connectivity Of Distributed Generators, Mahendra Ac

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The integration of distributed generators (DGs) such as wind farms and PV solar farms in distribution networks is getting severely constrained due to problems of steady state voltage rise and temporary overvoltages (TOV). This thesis presents a first time application of a patent-pending PV solar farm control as a dynamic reactive power compensator (STATCOM), termed PV-STATCOM, for mitigating the voltage rise and TOV issues, and significantly enhancing the connectivity of a neighbouring wind farm both during night and day in a realistic distribution feeder in Ontario. The effectiveness of PV-STATCOM is demonstrated even if the solar farm is located 30 …

Electroacoustic And Behavioural Evaluation Of Hearing Aid Digital Signal Processing Features, David J O Suelzle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Modern digital hearing aids provide an array of features to improve the user listening experience. As the features become more advanced and interdependent, it becomes increasingly necessary to develop accurate and cost-effective methods to evaluate their performance. Subjective experiments are an accurate method to determine hearing aid performance but they come with a high monetary and time cost. Four studies that develop and evaluate electroacoustic hearing aid feature evaluation techniques are presented. The first study applies a recent speech quality metric to two bilateral wireless hearing aids with various features enabled in a variety of environmental conditions. The study shows …

Detection, Receivers, And Performance Of Cpfsk And Cpck, Mohammed Zourob

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM) is a power/bandwidth efficient signaling technique for data transmission. In this thesis, two subclasses of this modulation called Continuous Phase Frequency Shift Keying (CPFSK) and Continuous Phase Chirp Keying (CPCK) are considered and their descriptions and properties are discussed in detail and several illustrations are given. Bayesian Maximum Likelihood Ratio Test (MLRT) is designed for detection of CPFSK and CPCK in AWGN channel. Based on this test, an optimum receiver structure, that minimizes the total probability of error, is obtained. Using high- and low-SNR approximations in the Bayesian test, two receivers, whose performances are analytically …

Improving The Geotagging Accuracy Of Street-Level Images, Mehrnaz Zouqi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Integrating images taken at street-level with satellite imagery is becoming increasingly valuable in the decision-making processes not only for individuals, but also in business and governmental sectors. To perform this integration, images taken at street-level need to be accurately georeferenced. This georeference information can be derived from a global positioning system (GPS). However, GPS data is prone to errors up to 15 meters, and needs to be corrected for the purpose of geo-referencing. In this thesis, an automatic method is proposed for correcting the georeference information obtained from the GPS data, based on image registration techniques. The proposed method uses …

A Framework For Measuring The Usability Issues And Criteria Of Mobile Learning Applications, Abdalha A. Ali

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the continuing growth of mobile devices outpacing that of desktops and laptops, mobile devices have become the new personal computer. These devices have become increasingly sophisticated and extremely powerful in the last few years. Substantial work has been done to measure mobile applications’ level of quality; many researchers have attempted to figure out why certain applications fail and others succeed.

In this thesis, a conceptual framework for measuring the quality aspects and criteria of m-learning is produced. Furthermore, a software prototype application for smartphones to assess usability issues of m-learning applications has been designed and implemented. This prototype application …

Rigid Body Attitude Estimation: An Overview And Comparative Study, Nojan Madinehi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The attitude estimation of rigid body systems has attracted the attention of many researchers over the years. The development of efficient estimation algorithms that can accurately estimate the orientation of a rigid body is a crucial step towards a reliable implementation of control schemes for underwater and flying vehicles.

The primary focus of this thesis consists in investigating various attitude estimation techniques and their applications.

Two major classes are discussed. The first class consists of the earliest static attitude determination techniques relying solely on a set of body vector measurements of known vectors in the inertial frame. The second class …

Objective And Subjective Evaluation Of Wideband Speech Quality, Nazanin Pourmand

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Traditional landline and cellular communications use a bandwidth of 300 - 3400 Hz for transmitting speech. This narrow bandwidth impacts quality, intelligibility and naturalness of transmitted speech. There is an impending change within the telecommunication industry towards using wider bandwidth speech, but the enlarged bandwidth also introduces a few challenges in speech processing. Echo and noise are two challenging issues in wideband telephony, due to increased perceptual sensitivity by users.

Subjective and/or objective measurements of speech quality are important in benchmarking speech processing algorithms and evaluating the effect of parameters like noise, echo, and delay in wideband telephony. Subjective measures …

Design And Optimization Of Efficient Wireless Power Transfer Links For Implantable Biotelemetry Systems, Shawon Senjuti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Wireless power transmission is a technique that converts energy from radio frequency (RF) electromagnetic (EM) waves into DC voltage, which has been used here for the purpose of providing a power supply to bio–implantable batteryless sensors. The main constraints of the design are to achieve the minimum power required by the application, by still keeping the implant size small enough for the living subject’s body. Resonance–based inductive coupling is a method being actively researched for the use in this type of power transmission, which uses two pairs of inductor coils in the external and implant circuits.

In this work, we …

A Dual-Rate Model Predictive Controller For Fieldbus Based Distributed Control Systems, Mohammad Arif Hossain

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In modern Distributed Control Systems (DCS), an industrial computer network protocol known as fieldbus is used in chemical, petro-chemical and other process industries for real-time communication between digital controllers, sensors, actuators and other smart devices. In a closed-loop digital control system, data is transferred from sensor to controller and controller to actuator cyclically in a timely but discontinuous fashion at a specific rate known as sampling-rate or macrocycle through fieldbus. According to the current trend of fieldbus technology, in most industrial control systems, the sampling-rate or macrocycle is fixed at the time of system configuration. This fixed sampling-rate makes it …