Variations of load demands, expansion of power system by interconnections among different areas and integration of renewable energy sources bring new challenges for stable, reliable and uninterrupted operations of power systems. In this paper, a control technique is proposed to control and optimize the performances of the three models having importance in the present and future energy systems. These are the output variations of an automatic voltage regulation (AVR) system, frequency variations in a load frequency control (LFC) system of a thermal power plant and frequency variations of a PV integrated thermal power plant. The proposed controller is a particle swarm optimized Ziegler–Nichols (ZN) method based proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) method suffers from the unavailability of prior knowledge of initial values of parameters. Whereas, the classical ZN method leaves the scope for performance improvements of a system. A rejuvenation to the classical ZN method is proposed by integrating PSO. The combined effect optimizes the voltage and the frequency performances, while ensuring system stability. Additionally, different objective functions inspired from energy industry requirements are considered to demonstrate performance improvements of the systems (e.g. maximum overshoot, steady-state error, settling time). The robustness of the proposed method is demonstrated by considering parametric uncertainty in the system. The proposed method is compared with performances of different controllers (e.g. PI, fuzzy PI, fuzzy PID), different iterative soft computing methods (e.g. pattern search, artificial bee colony, different variants of PSO) and classical optimization method (e.g. linear matrix inequality) considering different objective functions and different load disturbances for the aforementioned models. It is also observed that better performances are obtained using a significantly less number of iterations.

Glow discharge plasmas exhibit various types of self-excited oscillations for different initial conditions like discharge voltages and filling pressures. The behavior of such oscillations associated with the anode glow has been investigated using nonlinear techniques like correlation dimension, largest Lyapunov exponent, etc. It is seen that these oscillations go to an ordered state from a chaotic state with an increase in input energy, i.e., with discharge voltages implying occurrence of inverse bifurcations. These results are different from the other observations wherein the fluctuations have been observed to go from ordered to chaotic state.

Investigation of the functioning of the brain in living systems has been a major effort amongst scientists and medical practitioners. Amongst the various disorder of the brain, epilepsy has drawn the most attention because this disorder can affect the quality of life of a person. In this paper we have reinvestigated the EEGs for normal and epileptic patients using surrogate analysis, probability distribution function and Hurst exponent. Using random shuffled surrogate analysis, we have obtained some of the nonlinear features that was obtained by Andrzejak et al. [Phys Rev E 2001, 64:061907], for the epileptic patients during seizure. Probability distribution function shows that the activity of an epileptic brain is nongaussian in nature. Hurst exponent has been shown to be useful to characterize a normal and an epileptic brain and it shows that the epileptic brain is long term anticorrelated whereas, the normal brain is more or less stochastic. Among all the techniques, used here, Hurst exponent is found very useful for characterization different cases. In this article, differences in characteristics for normal subjects with eyes open and closed, epileptic subjects during seizure and seizure free intervals have been shown mainly using Hurst exponent. The H shows that the brain activity of a normal man is uncorrelated in nature whereas, epileptic brain activity shows long range anticorrelation.

Stochastic resonance (SR) and coherence resonance (CR) have been studied experimentally in discharge plasmas close to a homoclinic bifurcation. For the SR phenomenon, it is observed that a superimposed subthreshold periodic signal can be recovered via stochastic modulations of the discharge voltage. Furthermore, it is realized that even in the absence of a subthreshold deterministic signal, the system dynamics can be recovered and optimized using noise. This effect is defined as CR in the literature. In the present experiments, induction of SR and CR is quantified using the absolute mean difference and normalized variance techniques, respectively.