Summary Background Elevated blood pressure and glucose, serum cholesterol, and body mass index (BMI) are risk factors for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs); some of these factors also increase the risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and diabetes. We estimated CVD, CKD, and diabetes mortality attributable to these four cardio-metabolic risk factors for all countries and regions between 1980 and 2010. Methods We used data on risk factor exposure by country, age group, and sex from pooled analysis of population-based health surveys. Relative risks for cause-specific mortality were obtained from pooling of large prospective studies. We calculated the population attributable fractions (PAF) for each risk factor alone, and for the combination of all risk factors, accounting for multi-causality and for mediation of the effects of BMI by the other three risks. We calculated attributable deaths by multiplying the cause-specific PAFs by the number of disease-specific deaths from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors 2010 Study. We propagated the uncertainties of all inputs to the final estimates. Findings In 2010, high blood pressure was the leading risk factor for dying from CVDs, CKD, and diabetes in every region, causing over 40% of worldwide deaths from these diseases; high BMI and glucose were each responsible for about 15% of deaths; and cholesterol for 10%. After accounting for multi-causality, 63% (10.8 million deaths; 95% confidence interval 10.1–11.5) of deaths from these diseases were attributable to the combined effect of these four metabolic risk factors, compared with 67% (7.1 million deaths; 6.6–7.6) in 1980. The mortality burden of high BMI and glucose nearly doubled between 1980 and 2010. At the country level, age-standardised death rates attributable to these four risk factors surpassed 925 deaths per 100,000 among men in Belarus, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, but were below 130 deaths per 100,000 for women and below 200 for men in some high-income countries like Japan, Singapore, South Korea, France, Spain, The Netherlands, Australia, and Canada. Interpretations The salient features of the cardio-metabolic epidemic at the beginning of the twenty-first century are the large role of high blood pressure and an increasing impact of obesity and diabetes. There has been a shift in the mortality burden from high-income to low- and middle-income countries.

Different types of electric vehicles (EVs) have been recently designed with the aim of solving pollution problems caused by the emission of gasoline-powered engines. Environmental problems promote the adoption of new-generation electric vehicles for urban transportation. As it is well known, one of the weakest points of electric vehicles is the battery system. Vehicle autonomy and, therefore, accurate detection of battery state of charge (SoC) together with battery expected life, i.e., battery state of health, are among the major drawbacks that prevent the introduction of electric vehicles in the consumer market. The electric scooter may provide the most feasible opportunity among EVs. They may be a replacement product for the primary-use vehicle, especially in Europe and Asia, provided that drive performance, safety, and cost issues are similar to actual engine scooters. The battery system choice is a crucial item, and thanks to an increasing emphasis on vehicle range and performance, the Li-ion battery could become a viable candidate. This paper deals with the design of a battery pack based on Li-ion technology for a prototype electric scooter with high performance and autonomy. The adopted battery system is composed of a suitable number of cells series connected, featuring a high voltage level. Therefore, cell equalization and monitoring need to be provided. Due to manufacturing asymmetries, charge and discharge cycles lead to cell unbalancing, reducing battery capacity and, depending on cell type, causing safety troubles or strongly limiting the storage capacity of the full pack. No solution is available on the market at a cheap price, because of the required voltage level and performance, therefore, a dedicated battery management system was designed, that also includes a battery SoC monitoring. The proposed solution features a high capability of energy storing in braking conditions, charge equalization, overvoltage and undervoltage protection and, obviously, SoC information in order to optimize autonomy instead of performance or vice-versa.

The paper reports the comparison and performance evaluation of different diagnostic procedures that use input electric signals to detect and quantify rotor breakage in induction machines supplied by the mains. Besides the traditional current signature analysis based on one-phase current spectrum lines at frequencies (1 2 ) , the procedures based on analysis of the line at frequency 2 in the spectrum respectively of electromagnetic torque, space vector current modulus, and instantaneous power are considered. These last procedures have similar features and the comparison is developed on the basis of instantaneous torque. It is addressed that the speed ripple introduces two further terms in the instantaneous torque, decreasing the accuracy of the diagnosis. It is shown that there is a link between the angular displacement of the current sideband components at frequencies (1 2 ) . This allows a more correct quantitative evaluation of the fault and shows the superiority of the sideband current components diagnostic procedure over the other proposed methods.

This paper presents a single-phase transformerless grid-connected photovoltaic converter based on two cascaded full bridges with different dc-link voltages. The converter can synthesize up to nine voltage levels with a single dc bus, since one of the full bridges is supplied by a flying capacitor. The multilevel output reduces harmonic distortion and electromagnetic interference. A suitable switching strategy is employed to regulate the flying-capacitor voltage, improve the efficiency (most devices switch at the grid frequency), and minimize the common-mode leakage current with the help of a novel dedicated circuit (transient circuit). Simulations and experiments confirm the feasibility and good performance of the proposed converter

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The cross-saturation phenomenon in synchronous reluctance motors is extensively analyzed, with a main reference to motors of the transverse-laminated type. A mixed theoretical and experimental approach is adopted, aiming at definition of the motor's behavior when large overload currents are driven up to ten times the rated current. As a consequence, a special test and measuring procedure has been adopted. The obtained results are used to check the validity of the adopted model and to prove the unexpected overload performance of this motor

A global time-delayed feedback control is applied to a globally coupled reaction-diffusion system describing charge transport in a bistable semiconductor. We demonstrate that a variety of spatiotemporal unstable periodic orbits (UPOs) embedded in a chaotic attractor of the spatially extended system can be stabilized using an extended time-delay autosynchronization algorithm. These UPOs correspond to spiking current filaments. We critically evaluate analytical approximations for the limits of control originally developed for low-dimensional temporal chaos and show that the delay time can be extrapolated with high accuracy, while the theoretical limit for the control of UPOs in terms of the product of the period and the largest Lyapunov exponent is not reached. If the global feedback is modified by a spatial filter, we achieve stabilization of different spatial patterns.

Phase Change Memory (PCM) is a promising technology for building future main memory systems. A prominent characteristic of PCM is that it has write latency much higher than read latency. Servicing such slow writes causes significant contention for read requests. For our baseline PCM system, the slow writes increase the effective read latency by almost 2X, causing significant performance degradation.This paper alleviates the problem of slow writes by exploiting the fundamental property of PCM devices that writes are slow only in one direction (SET operation) and are almost as fast as reads in the other direction (RESET operation). Therefore, a write operation to a line in which all memory cells have been SET prior to the write, will incur much lower latency. We propose PreSET, an architectural technique that leverages this property to pro-actively SET all the bits in a given memory line well in advance of the anticipated write to that memory line. Our proposed design initiates a PreSET request for a memory line as soon as that line becomes dirty in the cache, thereby allowing a large window of time for the PreSET operation to complete. Our evaluations show that PreSET is more effective and incurs lower storage overhead than previously proposed write cancellation techniques. We also describe static and dynamic throttling schemes to limit the rate of PreSET operations. Our proposal reduces effective read latency from 982 cycles to 594 cycles and increases system performance by 34%, while improving the energy-delay-product by 25%.