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Solution methods for certain linear and nonlinear evolution equations are presented in this dissertation. Emphasis is placed mainly on the analytical treatment of nonautonomous differential equations, which are challenging to solve despite the existent numerical and symbolic computational software programs available. Ideas from the transformation theory are adopted allowing one

Solution methods for certain linear and nonlinear evolution equations are presented in this dissertation. Emphasis is placed mainly on the analytical treatment of nonautonomous differential equations, which are challenging to solve despite the existent numerical and symbolic computational software programs available. Ideas from the transformation theory are adopted allowing one to solve the problems under consideration from a non-traditional perspective. First, the Cauchy initial value problem is considered for a class of nonautonomous and inhomogeneous linear diffusion-type equation on the entire real line. Explicit transformations are used to reduce the equations under study to their corresponding standard forms emphasizing on natural relations with certain Riccati(and/or Ermakov)-type systems. These relations give solvability results for the Cauchy problem of the parabolic equation considered. The superposition principle allows to solve formally this problem from an unconventional point of view. An eigenfunction expansion approach is also considered for this general evolution equation. Examples considered to corroborate the efficacy of the proposed solution methods include the Fokker-Planck equation, the Black-Scholes model and the one-factor Gaussian Hull-White model. The results obtained in the first part are used to solve the Cauchy initial value problem for certain inhomogeneous Burgers-type equation. The connection between linear (the Diffusion-type) and nonlinear (Burgers-type) parabolic equations is stress in order to establish a strong commutative relation. Traveling wave solutions of a nonautonomous Burgers equation are also investigated. Finally, it is constructed explicitly the minimum-uncertainty squeezed states for quantum harmonic oscillators. They are derived by the action of corresponding maximal kinematical invariance group on the standard ground state solution. It is shown that the product of the variances attains the required minimum value only at the instances that one variance is a minimum and the other is a maximum, when the squeezing of one of the variances occurs. Such explicit construction is possible due to the relation between the diffusion-type equation studied in the first part and the time-dependent Schrodinger equation. A modication of the radiation field operators for squeezed photons in a perfect cavity is also suggested with the help of a nonstandard solution of Heisenberg's equation of motion.
ContributorsVega-Guzmán, José Manuel, 1982- (Author) / Sulov, Sergei K (Thesis advisor) / Castillo-Chavez, Carlos (Thesis advisor) / Platte, Rodrigo (Committee member) / Chowell-Puente, Gerardo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
There has been important progress in understanding ecological dynamics through the development of the theory of ecological stoichiometry. This fast growing theory provides new constraints and mechanisms that can be formulated into mathematical models. Stoichiometric models incorporate the effects of both food quantity and food quality into a single framework

There has been important progress in understanding ecological dynamics through the development of the theory of ecological stoichiometry. This fast growing theory provides new constraints and mechanisms that can be formulated into mathematical models. Stoichiometric models incorporate the effects of both food quantity and food quality into a single framework that produce rich dynamics. While the effects of nutrient deficiency on consumer growth are well understood, recent discoveries in ecological stoichiometry suggest that consumer dynamics are not only affected by insufficient food nutrient content (low phosphorus (P): carbon (C) ratio) but also by excess food nutrient content (high P:C). This phenomenon, known as the stoichiometric knife edge, in which animal growth is reduced not only by food with low P content but also by food with high P content, needs to be incorporated into mathematical models. Here we present Lotka-Volterra type models to investigate the growth response of Daphnia to algae of varying P:C ratios. Using a nonsmooth system of two ordinary differential equations (ODEs), we formulate the first model to incorporate the phenomenon of the stoichiometric knife edge. We then extend this stoichiometric model by mechanistically deriving and tracking free P in the environment. This resulting full knife edge model is a nonsmooth system of three ODEs. Bifurcation analysis and numerical simulations of the full model, that explicitly tracks phosphorus, leads to quantitatively different predictions than previous models that neglect to track free nutrients. The full model shows that the grazer population is sensitive to excess nutrient concentrations as a dynamical free nutrient pool induces extreme grazer population density changes. These modeling efforts provide insight on the effects of excess nutrient content on grazer dynamics and deepen our understanding of the effects of stoichiometry on the mechanisms governing population dynamics and the interactions between trophic levels.
ContributorsPeace, Angela (Author) / Kuang, Yang (Thesis advisor) / Elser, James J (Committee member) / Baer, Steven (Committee member) / Tang, Wenbo (Committee member) / Kang, Yun (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is any medical or public health procedure used before exposure to the disease causing agent, its purpose is to prevent, rather than treat or cure a disease. Most commonly, PrEP refers to an experimental HIV-prevention strategy that would use antiretrovirals to protect HIV-negative people from HIV infection.

Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is any medical or public health procedure used before exposure to the disease causing agent, its purpose is to prevent, rather than treat or cure a disease. Most commonly, PrEP refers to an experimental HIV-prevention strategy that would use antiretrovirals to protect HIV-negative people from HIV infection. A deterministic mathematical model of HIV transmission is developed to evaluate the public-health impact of oral PrEP interventions, and to compare PrEP effectiveness with respect to different evaluation methods. The effects of demographic, behavioral, and epidemic parameters on the PrEP impact are studied in a multivariate sensitivity analysis. Most of the published models on HIV intervention impact assume that the number of individuals joining the sexually active population per year is constant or proportional to the total population. In the second part of this study, three models are presented and analyzed to study the PrEP intervention, with constant, linear, and logistic recruitment rates. How different demographic assumptions can affect the evaluation of PrEP is studied. When provided with data, often least square fitting or similar approaches can be used to determine a single set of approximated parameter values that make the model fit the data best. However, least square fitting only provides point estimates and does not provide information on how strongly the data supports these particular estimates. Therefore, in the third part of this study, Bayesian parameter estimation is applied on fitting ODE model to the related HIV data. Starting with a set of prior distributions for the parameters as initial guess, Bayes' formula can be applied to obtain a set of posterior distributions for the parameters which makes the model fit the observed data best. Evaluating the posterior distribution often requires the integration of high-dimensional functions, which is usually difficult to calculate numerically. Therefore, the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is used to approximate the posterior distribution.
ContributorsZhao, Yuqin (Author) / Kuang, Yang (Thesis advisor) / Taylor, Jesse (Committee member) / Armbruster, Dieter (Committee member) / Tang, Wenbo (Committee member) / Kang, Yun (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
This thesis considers the application of basis pursuit to several problems in system identification. After reviewing some key results in the theory of basis pursuit and compressed sensing, numerical experiments are presented that explore the application of basis pursuit to the black-box identification of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with both

This thesis considers the application of basis pursuit to several problems in system identification. After reviewing some key results in the theory of basis pursuit and compressed sensing, numerical experiments are presented that explore the application of basis pursuit to the black-box identification of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with both finite (FIR) and infinite (IIR) impulse responses, temporal systems modeled by ordinary differential equations (ODE), and spatio-temporal systems modeled by partial differential equations (PDE). For LTI systems, the experimental results illustrate existing theory for identification of LTI FIR systems. It is seen that basis pursuit does not identify sparse LTI IIR systems, but it does identify alternate systems with nearly identical magnitude response characteristics when there are small numbers of non-zero coefficients. For ODE systems, the experimental results are consistent with earlier research for differential equations that are polynomials in the system variables, illustrating feasibility of the approach for small numbers of non-zero terms. For PDE systems, it is demonstrated that basis pursuit can be applied to system identification, along with a comparison in performance with another existing method. In all cases the impact of measurement noise on identification performance is considered, and it is empirically observed that high signal-to-noise ratio is required for successful application of basis pursuit to system identification problems.
ContributorsThompson, Robert C. (Author) / Platte, Rodrigo (Thesis advisor) / Gelb, Anne (Committee member) / Cochran, Douglas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Modern measurement schemes for linear dynamical systems are typically designed so that different sensors can be scheduled to be used at each time step. To determine which sensors to use, various metrics have been suggested. One possible such metric is the observability of the system. Observability is a binary condition

Modern measurement schemes for linear dynamical systems are typically designed so that different sensors can be scheduled to be used at each time step. To determine which sensors to use, various metrics have been suggested. One possible such metric is the observability of the system. Observability is a binary condition determining whether a finite number of measurements suffice to recover the initial state. However to employ observability for sensor scheduling, the binary definition needs to be expanded so that one can measure how observable a system is with a particular measurement scheme, i.e. one needs a metric of observability. Most methods utilizing an observability metric are about sensor selection and not for sensor scheduling. In this dissertation we present a new approach to utilize the observability for sensor scheduling by employing the condition number of the observability matrix as the metric and using column subset selection to create an algorithm to choose which sensors to use at each time step. To this end we use a rank revealing QR factorization algorithm to select sensors. Several numerical experiments are used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme.
ContributorsIlkturk, Utku (Author) / Gelb, Anne (Thesis advisor) / Platte, Rodrigo (Thesis advisor) / Cochran, Douglas (Committee member) / Renaut, Rosemary (Committee member) / Armbruster, Dieter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Factory production is stochastic in nature with time varying input and output processes that are non-stationary stochastic processes. Hence, the principle quantities of interest are random variables. Typical modeling of such behavior involves numerical simulation and statistical analysis. A deterministic closure model leading to a second

Factory production is stochastic in nature with time varying input and output processes that are non-stationary stochastic processes. Hence, the principle quantities of interest are random variables. Typical modeling of such behavior involves numerical simulation and statistical analysis. A deterministic closure model leading to a second order model for the product density and product speed has previously been proposed. The resulting partial differential equations (PDE) are compared to discrete event simulations (DES) that simulate factory production as a time dependent M/M/1 queuing system. Three fundamental scenarios for the time dependent influx are studied: An instant step up/down of the mean arrival rate; an exponential step up/down of the mean arrival rate; and periodic variation of the mean arrival rate. It is shown that the second order model, in general, yields significant improvement over current first order models. Specifically, the agreement between the DES and the PDE for the step up and for periodic forcing that is not too rapid is very good. Adding diffusion to the PDE further improves the agreement. The analysis also points to fundamental open issues regarding the deterministic modeling of low signal-to-noise ratio for some stochastic processes and the possibility of resonance in deterministic models that is not present in the original stochastic process.
ContributorsWienke, Matthew (Author) / Armbruster, Dieter (Thesis advisor) / Jones, Donald (Committee member) / Platte, Rodrigo (Committee member) / Gardner, Carl (Committee member) / Ringhofer, Christian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Swarms of animals, fish, birds, locusts etc. are a common occurrence but their coherence and method of organization poses a major question for mathematics and biology.The Vicsek and the Attraction-Repulsion are two models that have been proposed to explain the emergence of collective motion. A major issue

Swarms of animals, fish, birds, locusts etc. are a common occurrence but their coherence and method of organization poses a major question for mathematics and biology.The Vicsek and the Attraction-Repulsion are two models that have been proposed to explain the emergence of collective motion. A major issue for the Vicsek Model is that its particles are not attracted to each other, leaving the swarm with alignment in velocity but without spatial coherence. Restricting the particles to a bounded domain generates global spatial coherence of swarms while maintaining velocity alignment. While individual particles are specularly reflected at the boundary, the swarm as a whole is not. As a result, new dynamical swarming solutions are found.

The Attraction-Repulsion Model set with a long-range attraction and short-range repulsion interaction potential typically stabilizes to a well-studied flock steady state solution. The particles for a flock remain spatially coherent but have no spatial bound and explore all space. A bounded domain with specularly reflecting walls traps the particles within a specific region. A fundamental refraction law for a swarm impacting on a planar boundary is derived. The swarm reflection varies from specular for a swarm dominated by

kinetic energy to inelastic for a swarm dominated by potential energy. Inelastic collisions lead to alignment with the wall and to damped pulsating oscillations of the swarm. The fundamental refraction law provides a one-dimensional iterative map that allows for a prediction and analysis of the trajectory of the center of mass of a flock in a channel and a square domain.

The extension of the wall collisions to a scattering experiment is conducted by setting two identical flocks to collide. The two particle dynamics is studied analytically and shows a transition from scattering: diverging flocks to bound states in the form of oscillations or parallel motions. Numerical studies of collisions of flocks show the same transition where the bound states become either a single translating flock or a rotating (mill).
ContributorsThatcher, Andrea (Author) / Armbruster, Hans (Thesis advisor) / Motsch, Sebastien (Committee member) / Ringhofer, Christian (Committee member) / Platte, Rodrigo (Committee member) / Gardner, Carl (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Presented is a study on the chemotaxis reaction process and its relation with flow topology. The effect of coherent structures in turbulent flows is characterized by studying nutrient uptake and the advantage that is received from motile bacteria over other non-motile bacteria. Variability is found to be dependent on the

Presented is a study on the chemotaxis reaction process and its relation with flow topology. The effect of coherent structures in turbulent flows is characterized by studying nutrient uptake and the advantage that is received from motile bacteria over other non-motile bacteria. Variability is found to be dependent on the initial location of scalar impurity and can be tied to Lagrangian coherent structures through recent advances in the identification of finite-time transport barriers. Advantage is relatively small for initial nutrient found within high stretching regions of the flow, and nutrient within elliptic structures provide the greatest advantage for motile species. How the flow field and the relevant flow topology lead to such a relation is analyzed.
ContributorsJones, Kimberly (Author) / Tang, Wenbo (Thesis advisor) / Kang, Yun (Committee member) / Jones, Donald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
The tools developed for the use of investigating dynamical systems have provided critical understanding to a wide range of physical phenomena. Here these tools are used to gain further insight into scalar transport, and how it is affected by mixing. The aim of this research is to investigate the efficiency

The tools developed for the use of investigating dynamical systems have provided critical understanding to a wide range of physical phenomena. Here these tools are used to gain further insight into scalar transport, and how it is affected by mixing. The aim of this research is to investigate the efficiency of several different partitioning methods which demarcate flow fields into dynamically distinct regions, and the correlation of finite-time statistics from the advection-diffusion equation to these regions.

For autonomous systems, invariant manifold theory can be used to separate the system into dynamically distinct regions. Despite there being no equivalent method for nonautonomous systems, a similar analysis can be done. Systems with general time dependencies must resort to using finite-time transport barriers for partitioning; these barriers are the edges of Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS), the analog to the stable and unstable manifolds of invariant manifold theory. Using the coherent structures of a flow to analyze the statistics of trapping, flight, and residence times, the signature of anomalous diffusion are obtained.

This research also investigates the use of linear models for approximating the elements of the covariance matrix of nonlinear flows, and then applying the covariance matrix approximation over coherent regions. The first and second-order moments can be used to fully describe an ensemble evolution in linear systems, however there is no direct method for nonlinear systems. The problem is only compounded by the fact that the moments for nonlinear flows typically don't have analytic representations, therefore direct numerical simulations would be needed to obtain the moments throughout the domain. To circumvent these many computations, the nonlinear system is approximated as many linear systems for which analytic expressions for the moments exist. The parameters introduced in the linear models are obtained locally from the nonlinear deformation tensor.
ContributorsWalker, Phillip (Author) / Tang, Wenbo (Thesis advisor) / Kostelich, Eric (Committee member) / Mahalov, Alex (Committee member) / Moustaoui, Mohamed (Committee member) / Platte, Rodrigo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Inverse problems model real world phenomena from data, where the data are often noisy and models contain errors. This leads to instabilities, multiple solution vectors and thus ill-posedness. To solve ill-posed inverse problems, regularization is typically used as a penalty function to induce stability and allow for the incorporation of

Inverse problems model real world phenomena from data, where the data are often noisy and models contain errors. This leads to instabilities, multiple solution vectors and thus ill-posedness. To solve ill-posed inverse problems, regularization is typically used as a penalty function to induce stability and allow for the incorporation of a priori information about the desired solution. In this thesis, high order regularization techniques are developed for image and function reconstruction from noisy or misleading data. Specifically the incorporation of the Polynomial Annihilation operator allows for the accurate exploitation of the sparse representation of each function in the edge domain.

This dissertation tackles three main problems through the development of novel reconstruction techniques: (i) reconstructing one and two dimensional functions from multiple measurement vectors using variance based joint sparsity when a subset of the measurements contain false and/or misleading information, (ii) approximating discontinuous solutions to hyperbolic partial differential equations by enhancing typical solvers with l1 regularization, and (iii) reducing model assumptions in synthetic aperture radar image formation, specifically for the purpose of speckle reduction and phase error correction. While the common thread tying these problems together is the use of high order regularization, the defining characteristics of each of these problems create unique challenges.

Fast and robust numerical algorithms are also developed so that these problems can be solved efficiently without requiring fine tuning of parameters. Indeed, the numerical experiments presented in this dissertation strongly suggest that the new methodology provides more accurate and robust solutions to a variety of ill-posed inverse problems.
ContributorsScarnati, Theresa (Author) / Gelb, Anne (Thesis advisor) / Platte, Rodrigo (Thesis advisor) / Cochran, Douglas (Committee member) / Gardner, Carl (Committee member) / Sanders, Toby (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018