Electrical and Electronics Commons^™

Design And Analysis Of A Fully-Integrated Resonant Gate Driver, Yu Long

Doctoral Dissertations

Several decades ago the resonant gate driving technique was proposed. Given the recent rapid growth in GaN HEMT power device applications for high-frequency power applications, research has been conducted in the power electronics field using resonant gate driving for GaN power devices. Previous research for resonant gate drivers for GaN HEMT devices mostly focused on implementing the gate driving function itself, and mostly for normally-on HEMT devices.

The normally-off (enhancement mode) GaN power device was introduced to the commercial market in 2009. A new resonate gate driver is proposed in this work to implement resonant gate driving for commercial high-speed …

Low Cross-Polarization Vivaldi Arrays, John Logan

Doctoral Dissertations

Ultra-wideband (UWB) electronically scanned arrays (ESA) with high efficiency, excellent polarization agility, and wide-scan matching remain essential for servicing multifunctional RF front-ends and other communications, sensing, and jamming or countermeasure systems. To this day, the most popular antenna array element in modern UWB-ESA systems is the Vivaldi, or flared notch, due to its superior wide-scan wide impedance bandwidth, well-known design guidelines, and practical embodiment versatility. Despite their popularity, these arrays tend to radiate unacceptably high cross-polarization levels, thus encouraging a great research opportunity. This dissertation presents the theory and design of a new class of UWB-ESAs, termed Sliced Notch Antenna …

Bi-Level Optimization Considering Uncertainties Of Wind Power And Demand Response, Xin Fang

Doctoral Dissertations

Recently, world-wide power systems have been undergone a paradigm change with increasing penetration of renewable energy. The renewable energy is clean with low operation cost while subject to significant variability and uncertainty. Therefore, integration of renewables presents various challenges in power systems. Meanwhile, to offset the uncertainty from renewables, demand response (DR) has gained considerable research interests because of DR’s flexibility to mitigate the uncertainty from renewables. In this dissertation, various power system problems using bi-level optimization are investigated considering the uncertainties from wind power and demand response.

In power system planning, reactive power planning (RPP) under high-penetration wind power …

Development Of A Portable Cmos Time-Domain Fluorescence Lifetime Imager, Hongtao Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Modern laboratory equipments to measure the excited-state lifetime of fluorophores usually include an expensive picosecond pulsed-laser excitation source, a fragile photomultiplier tube, and a large instrument body for optics. A portable and robust device to make fluorescence lifetime measurement in nanosecond scale is of great attraction for chemists and biologists. This dissertation reports the development of a portable LED time-domain fluorimeter from an all-solid-state discrete-component prototype to its advanced CMOS integrated circuit implementation. The motivation of the research is to develop a multiplexed fluorimeter for point-of-care diagnosis. Instruments developed by this novel method have higher fill factor, are more portable, …

Adopting 3d Time-Of-Flight Sensing Technology For Design Information Verification In International Safeguards, Matthew Stephen Duchene

Doctoral Dissertations

International safeguards inspectors periodically perform examinations at sensitive nuclear facilities to verify that the facilities’ designs, layouts, and functions are identical to information declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Such design information verification (DIV) relies on tools and techniques—such as 3D laser range-finding (3DLR) with light detection and ranging (LIDAR) instruments—that are resource intensive. This research explores 3D Time-of-Flight (TOF) sensors as a possible alternative technology to LIDAR systems for performing spatial change-detection to enhance the DIV process.

This research uses the Microsoft Kinect Version 2 (Kinect v2) camera system, one of several commercial depth-sensing instruments that is …

Design And Implementation Of An Integrated Biosensor Platform For Lab-On-A-Chip Diabetic Care Systems, Khandaker Abdullah Al Mamun

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent advances in semiconductor processing and microfabrication techniques allow the implementation of complex microstructures in a single platform or lab on chip. These devices require fewer samples, allow lightweight implementation, and offer high sensitivities. However, the use of these microstructures place stringent performance constraints on sensor readout architecture. In glucose sensing for diabetic patients, portable handheld devices are common, and have demonstrated significant performance improvement over the last decade. Fluctuations in glucose levels with patient physiological conditions are highly unpredictable and glucose monitors often require complex control algorithms along with dynamic physiological data. Recent research has focused on long term …