Fish are used in a variety of experimental contexts often in high numbers. To maintain their welfare and ensure valid results during invasive procedures it is vital that we can detect subtle changes in behaviour that may allow us to intervene to provide pain-relief. Therefore, an automated method, the Fish Behaviour Index (FBI), was devised and used for testing the impact of laboratory procedures and efficacy of analgesic drugs in the model species, the zebrafish. Cameras with tracking software were used to visually track and quantify female zebrafish behaviour in real time after a number of laboratory procedures including fin clipping, PIT tagging, and nociceptor excitation via injection of acetic acid subcutaneously. The FBI was derived from activity and distance swum measured before and after these procedures compared with control and sham groups. Further, the efficacy of a range of drugs with analgesic properties to identify efficacy of these agents was explored. Lidocaine (5 mg/L), flunixin (8 mg/L) and morphine (48 mg/L) prevented the associated reduction in activity and distance swum after fin clipping. From an ethical perspective, the FBI represents a significant refinement in the use of zebrafish and could be adopted across a wide range of biological disciplines.

Abstract-When LCL filters are applied to digitally controlled grid-connected inverters, the design of controllers is usually implemented using classic average models. The accuracy of these models in s-domain is only guaranteed in low frequency range. In order to predict the dynamic behaviors, new smallsignal z-domain models are deduced for digitally controlled gridconnected inverters with converter current control scheme and converter current plus grid current control scheme. The proposed methods model the inverters including different delay effects under most possible circumstances, which allows direct design for controllers in z-domain. The stability boundaries obtained from the root loci of the classic average models and the proposed zdomain models and the discrete state space models are compared to the simulation results, showing that the proposed z-domain models are more effective in predicting instabilities. Experimental results are presented and compared to the average models predictions and z-domain models predictions, which shows the proposed models are capable of predicting the values of control variables at the true sampling instants.

The ability to assess welfare is an important refinement that will ensure the good condition of animals used in experimentation. The present study investigated the impact of invasive procedures on the patterns of movement of zebrafish (Danio rerio). Recordings were made before and after fin clipping, PIT tagging and a standard pain test and these were compared with control and sham handled zebrafish. The fractal dimension (FD) from the 3D trajectories was calculated to determine the effect of these treatments on the complexity of movement patterns. While the FD of zebrafish trajectories did not differ over time in either the control or sham group, the FDs of the treatment groups reduced in complexity. The FD of fish injected with different strengths of acetic acid declined in a dose-dependent manner allowing us to develop an arbitrary scale of severity of the treatments. The 3D trajectory plots from some groups indicated the presence of repetitive swimming patterns akin to stereotypical movements. When administered with lidocaine, which has analgesic properties, the movement complexity of fin clipped fish reverted to a pattern that resembled that of control fish. Fractal analysis of zebrafish locomotion could potentially be adopted as a tool for fish welfare assessment.

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Calculated thermophysical properties of nitrogen plasmas in and out of thermal equilibrium are presented. The cutoff of the partition functions due to the lowering of the ionization potential has been taken into account, together with the contributions from different core excited electronic states. The species composition and thermodynamic properties are determined numerically using the Newton-Raphson iterative method, taking into account the corrections due to Coulomb interactions. The transport properties including diffusion coefficient, viscosity, thermal conductivity, and electrical conductivity are calculated using the most recent collision interaction potentials by adopting Devoto's electron and heavy particle decoupling approach, expanded to the third-order approximation (second-order for viscosity) in the framework of Chapman-Enskog method. Results are presented in the pressure range of 0.1 atm to 10 atm and in electron temperature range from 300 to 40 000 K, with the ratio of electron temperature to heavy-particle temperature varied from 1 to 20. Results are compared with those from previous works, and the influences of different definitions of the Debye length are discussed.