A neutral-point potential balance control strategy for three-level inverter based on VSVPWM

The topology of diode neutral-point-clamped(NPC)three-level inverter is prone to neutral-point potential offset.When the sum of three-phase current is zero,the virtual space vector pulse width modulation(VSVPWM)scheme does not cause the neutral-point voltage offset,but it lacks the ability to balance the deviation.For this reason,a neutral-point potential control strategy combining virtual space vector modulation and loop width control is proposed.The neutral-point potential is balanced by introducing the distribution factor for the regions with redundant vectors.For other regions,the potential is controlled by selecting a suitable switching sequence.Meanwhile,the effect on the virtual vector modulation is reduced within the loop width by setting an appropriate loop width,thereby improving the balance effect.The simulation results show that the proposed method has a strong ability to control the offset and has excellent potential balance performance under the conditions of balanced load,unbalanced load and asymmetric capacitance parameters.

Effective Potential of a Two-State Model for Molecular Motor

We study force generation and motion of molecular motors using a simple two-state model in the paper.Asymmetric and periodic potential is adopted to describe the interaction between motor proteins and filaments that are periodic and polar. The current and the slope of the effective potential as functions of the temperature and transition rates are calculated in the two-state model. The ratio of the slope of the effective potential to the current is also calculated. It is shown that the directed motion of motor proteins is relevant to the effective potential. The slope of the effective potential corresponds to an average force. The non-vanishing force therefore implies that detailed balance is broken in the process of transition between different states.

Stagnant low-energy ions in the near cusp region observed by Cluster

Measuring the low-energy ions in the Earth's magnetotail lobes is difficult, because a spacecraft becomes positively charged in a sunlit and tenuous plasma environment. Recent studies have introduced a new method, making use of the positive electric potential on the Cluster spacecraft, to measure the low-energy ions(less than a few tens of electronvolts) in the polar caps/magnetotail lobes in the years 2001–2010. With the measured velocities, we are able to study the trajectories of these low-energy ions. Particle tracing has been used in previous studies, confirming that ions of ionospheric origin are the dominant contributor to the ion population in the Earth's magnetotail lobes. In this work, we continue to study the source of low-energy ions measured in the lobes. We found that not all of the low-energy ions in the lobes come directly from the ionosphere. Particle tracing infers that some of the low-energy ions start to move tailward from the cusp/near-cusp region with a zero parallel velocity. In the following, we refer to these low-energy ions as stagnant low-energy ions. On the other hand, the in situ measurements by Cluster show a population of low-energy ions in the cusp/near-cusp region with pitch angles near 90°(i.e., no significant parallel velocity).The locations of stagnant low-energy ions are determined by particle tracing and in situ measurements. Similar ion energies and spatial distributions determined by these two methods confirm the presence of the stagnant low-energy ion population.