Scarcely understood defects lead to asthenozoospermia, which results in poor fertility outcomes. Incomplete knowledge of these defects hinders the development of new therapies and reliance on interventional therapies, such as in vitro fertilization, increases. Sperm cells, being transcriptionally and translationally silent, necessitate the proteomic approach to study the sperm function. We have performed a differential proteomics analysis of human sperm and seminal plasma and identified and quantified 667 proteins in sperm and 429 proteins in seminal plasma data set, which were used for further analysis. Statistical and mathematical analysis combined with pathway analysis and self-organizing maps clustering and correlation was performed on the data set. It was found that sperm proteomic signature combined with statistical analysis as opposed to the seminal plasma proteomic signature can differentiate the normozoospermic versus the asthenozoospermic sperm samples. This is despite the results that some of the seminal plasma proteins have big fold changes among classes but they fall short of statistical significance. S-Plot of the sperm proteomic data set generated some high confidence targets, which might be implicated in sperm motility pathways. These proteins also had the area under the curve value of 0.9 or 1 in ROC curve analysis. Various pathways were either enriched in these proteomic data sets by pathway analysis or they were searched by their constituent proteins. Some of these pathways were axoneme activation and focal adhesion assembly, glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, cellular response to stress and nucleosome assembly among others. The mass spectrometric data is available via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD004098.

The operational cost of wind turbines(WT) is remarkably incurred in fatigue loads induced by torsional vibration within the drive-train subsystem and fore-aft bending of the tower subsystem. Under closed-loop control configuration, actuator faults in pitch subsystem and converter subsystem proliferate these fatigue loads, thereby, severely affect the economic operation of WT. In this paper, we present a novel active fault-tolerant control(FTC) methodology for WT, which minimizes the economic cost of WT by achieving the two broad objectives: power maximization and fatigue reduction, possibly under the effect of torque bias faults in converters. The proposed FTC system is composed of two modules: fault diagnosis(FD),and controller reconfiguration(CR). We develop the CR module using a model-predictive control(MPC) technique where the primary issue is that the constraint set is not convex in decision variables. The novelty of the proposed scheme lies in transforming the original non-convex optimization problem into a convex problem using some new decision variables. We also develop the FD module using an unknown-input-residual generator and a suitably designed estimation filter to extract the complete information of the fault. This fault information is subsequently used to reconfigure in real-time the constraints of the MPC to ensure system availability. The effectiveness of the developed scheme is demonstrated on a 2MW WT system.

This paper presents a real-time mechanism to tolerate faults occurring in a wind turbine (WT) system. This system is a FAST coded simulator designed by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL's) National Wind Turbine Center. The demonstrated mechanism lies under the taxonomy of active fault-tolerant control (AFTC) systems, namely the projection-based approach. In the proposed approach, we do not use any a priori information about the model of the turbine in real-time. In fact, we use the online measurements generated by WT. Based on the given control objectives, and the observed measurements, an occurring fault is accommodated by reconfiguring the controller such that the turbine generates the rated power even under faulty conditions. Second, no use of an explicit fault-diagnosis module is seen in this approach. Therefore, the fault accommodation delay in the proposed AFTC structure is smaller than the delay as experienced in the traditional structure of AFTC systems.