DiVA - Academic Archive On-line

Averaging level control in the presence of frequent inlet flow upsets

Peter Rosander — Tue, 8 May 2012 10:22:00 +0200

Buffer tanks are widely used within the process industry to prevent flow variations from being directly propagated throughout a plant. The capacity of the tank is used to smoothly transfer inlet flow upsets to the outlet. Ideally, the tank thus works as a low pass filter where the available tank capacity limits the achievable flow smoothing.

For infrequently occurring upsets, where the system has time to reach steady state between flow changes, the averaging level control problem has been extensively studied. After an inlet flow change, flow filtering has traditionally been obtained by letting the tank level deviate from its nominal value while slowly adapting the outlet to cancel out the flow imbalance and eventually bringing back the level to its set-point. The system is then again in steady state and ready to surge the next upset. By ensuring that the single largest upset can be handled without violating the level constraints, satisfactory flow smoothing is obtained.

In this thesis, the smoothing of frequently changing inlet flows is addressed. In this case, standard level controllers struggle to obtain acceptable flow smoothing since the system rarely is in steady state and flow upsets can thus not be treated as separate events. To obtain a control law that achieves optimal filtering while directly accounting for future upsets, the averaging level control problem was approached using robust model predictive control (MPC).

The robust MPC differs in the way it obtains flow smoothing by not returning the tank level to a fixed set-point. Instead, it lets the steady state tank level depend on the current value of the inlet flow. This insight was then used to propose a linear control structure, designed to filter frequent upsets optimally. Analyses and simulation results indicate that the proposed linear and robust MPC controller obtain flow smoothing comparable to the standard optimal averaging level controllers for infrequent upsets while handling frequent upsets considerably better.

Phosphoproteomic analysis of Arabidopsis thaliana ribosomes

Hanna Klang Årstrand — Wed, 9 May 2012 09:09:00 +0200

Ribosomes serve as the site of protein synthesis in all living cells. Ribosomes were discovered in 1955 by George E. Palade when he was studying the endoplasmic reticulum which is covered by ribosomes. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 for this discovery. Ribosomes are large protein and rRNA complexes which are made up from one small and one large subunit that work together to translate mRNA into a protein chain. Eukaryotic translation is mainly controlled during the initiation, which involves protein phosphorylation. In plants there is a general increase of protein synthesis during the day in order to synthesize proteins needed for photosynthesis. Phosphorylation can alter protein function and localization and is reversibly added and removed by kinases and phosphatases, respectively.

The aim of the studies in this thesis was to elucidate the phosphorylation status of ribosomal proteins in the Arabidopsis thaliana 80S ribosome. I have focused on comparing ribosomal protein phosphorylation between different conditions and sub cellular locations, namely day/night conditions and cytosol/nucleus location.

By using Fe³⁺IMAC to enrich phosphorylated peptides from cytosolic ribosomes followed by mass spectrometric analysis eight serine residues in six ribosomal proteins were found to be phosphorylated. Among these was a novel phosphorylation site in 40S ribosomal protein S6 at Serine 231. By using quantification with stable isotope labeling and mass spectrometry this phosphorylated residue and three other ribosomal phosphopeptides were found to have increased phosphorylation levels during day as compared to night ranging from 2 to 4 times. This phosphorylation increase can in turn effect the modulation of the diurnal protein synthesis in Arabidopis thaliana.

Ribosome biogenesis involves shuttling of proteins and ribosomal subunits between the cell nucleus and cytoplasm. By purifying ribosomal proteins from these two cellular compartments and enriching for phosphopeptides using TiO2 affinity chromatography combined with mass spectrometry I was able to analyze their phosphorylation status. This method identified 13 phosphopeptides derived from 11 ribosomal proteins as well as phosphopeptides from two ribosomal associated proteins. 40S ribosomal protein S2-3 was found phosphorylated only in the cytoplasmic samples while 60S ribosomal protein L13-1 and the two ribosomal associated proteins were found only in the nuclear enriched samples.

Spin-dependent recombination in Ga(In)NAs alloys

Yuttapoom Puttisong — Mon, 7 May 2012 10:53:00 +0200

The abilities to control and manipulate electron spin, especially in semiconductors, lead to many interesting proposals for spin-functional devices in future spintronics and quantum information technology. A key requirement for the success of these proposals is that the spin functionality should be operational at room temperature (RT), which remains as a great challenge. Very recently, spin-dependent recombination (SDR) via paramagnetic defects that dominate in carrier recombination, i.e Gai - interstitial defects in Ga(In)NAs alloys, has been shown to turn the material into a highly efficient defectengineered spin filter operating at RT and without requiring an external applied field. This finding has demonstrated the great potential of such a spin filter as an efficient spin source, which is capable of generating up to 90% electron spin polarization at RT.

Essential to realization of this attractive application in spintronics is a fundamental understanding of this alloy system and their related spin filtering defects. Therefore, factors controlling this spin filter must be studied, understood and optimized. In this licentiate thesis, we aim at optimization of the spin filtering effect in Ga(In)NAs alloys and the related quantum structures by studying influence of material fabrication techniques, post growth treatments and material structures. In paper I, we employed the optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) technique to study formation of Ga interstitial-related defects in Ga(In)NAs alloys. We showed that these spin-filtering defects are common grown-in defects in these alloys, independent of the employed fabrication techniques and post-growth annealing treatment. The defect formation was suggested to be thermodynamically favorable in the presence of nitrogen, possibly because of local strain compensation. In paper II, we further investigated the role of post-growth hydrogen treatment in the spin filtering effect in GaNAs epilayers and GaNAs/GaAs multiple quantum wells (QWs). From optical orientation studies, we found that the hydrogen treatment has led to nearly complete quenching of the spin filtering effect. Together with a detailed ODMR study and a rate equation analysis, the observed effect of hydrogen was attributed to hydrogen passivation of the spin filtering defects, likely by formation of complexes between the Gai-interstitial defects and hydrogen. This finding also ruled out the possibility of hydrogen as a part of the spin filtering defects in the as-grown materials, though hydrogen is known to be commonly present during the growth process.

In Paper III, we examined the effectiveness of the spin filtering effect in the GaNAs/GaAs QWs as a function of QW width. Even with rather narrow QW widths of 3-9 nm, the spin filtering effect was shown to be efficient. It was further revealed that the spin filtering effect is more efficient in the wider QWs. From studies of transient behavior of photoluminescence and ODMR, it was concluded that this was mainly due to an increase in the sheet concentration of the spin filtering defects.

Excitonic effects in ZnO

Shula Chen — Mon, 7 May 2012 15:41:00 +0200

Zinc Oxide (ZnO) is an extensively researched II-VI wide bandgap semiconductor material. As a promising material for future optoelectronic and spintronic applications, it continues to attract enormous amount of interest. Though over the past decades extensive experimental and theoretical work has been done to deepen the understanding of its fundamental material properties, there are still controversial and unexplored areas. The research work summarized in this thesis was aimed at clarifying and exploring some of these areas, as will be introduced below.

One of attractive properties of ZnO is a very large binding energy of free excitons (FX), which makes excitonic effects of particular importance in this material. The excitons couple with other elementary excitations inside the material such as longitudinal optical (LO) phonons or photons. The former leads to the intense LO phonon-assisted radiative transitions, while the latter causes formation of the exciton-polariton.

The exciton-phonon coupling was suggested to be enhanced in ZnO-based nano- and microstructures. This conclusion was based on the prevalence in these structures at room temperature of LO phonon-assisted FX transitions, which is in contrast with bulk ZnO photoluminescence (PL) where the no-phonon (NP) FX emission dominates. The exact mechanism for this effect, however, was not clear. In paper 1, we have clarified these issues by employing PL and cathodoluminescence (CL) measurements performed for bulk ZnO material and ZnO tetrapods. From spatially resolved CL studies, we have shown that the suppression of the NP FX emission strongly depends on structural morphology of the ZnO tetrapods and becomes most significant within areas with faceted surfaces. The effect is interpreted using a model based on re-absorption due to multiple internal reflections in the vicinity of the FX resonance.

As to the exciton-photon coupling, it usually leads to formation of mixed or coupled states of excitons and photons known as exciton-polaritons. The exciton-polariton formation has been demonstrated to lead to slow-down of light in several semiconductor materials such as CdZnTe, GaN, etc. Due to the strong exciton-photon coupling in ZnO, the polariton formation may also affect light velocity in this medium. To explore this effect, we have performed timeof-flight measurement using pulsed laser light. Our studies that are summarized in paper 2 have shown that the group velocity of light in bulk ZnO could be decreased down to 2044km/s and the magnitude of this decrease depends on light polarization. The main physical mechanism responsible for this effect was singled out as being due to the formation of free exciton-polaritons that propagate coherently via ballistic transport. Based on the experimentally determined spectral dependence of the polariton group velocity, the polariton dispersion was also determined.

Excitonic effects in ZnO could also be utilized to investigate fundamental properties of ZnO. For example, previous magneto-optical studies of donor bound excitons allowed to establish ordering of valence band (VB) states and also provided consistent information on the sign and g-factor of holes from the upper A-valence subband. On the other hand, properties of the higher lying B-VB subband were not fully understood. To clarify this issue, we have performed time-resolved and magneto-PL studies for the so-called I6 B and I7 B excitonic transitions which involved a hole from the B-VB subband as summarized in paper 3. From the magneto-PL measurements, values of effective g-factors for conduction band electrons and B valence band holes were determined as g_e =1.91, g_h =1.79 and g_h =0, respectively.