The mammalian auditory sensory epithelium, the organ of Corti, is composed of hair cells and supporting cells. Hair cells contain specializations in the apical, basolateral and synaptic membranes. These specializations mediate mechanotransduction, electrical and mechanical activities and synaptic transmission. Supporting cells maintain homeostasis of the ionic and chemical environment of the cochlea and contribute to the stiffness of the cochlear partition. While spontaneous proliferation and transdifferentiation of supporting cells are the source of the regenerative response to replace lost hair cells in lower vertebrates, supporting cells in adult mammals no longer retain that capability. An important first step to revealing the basic biological properties of supporting cells is to characterize their cell-type specific transcriptomes. Using RNA-seq, we examined the transcriptomes of 1,000 pillar and 1,000 Deiters' cells, as well as the two types of hair cells, individually collected from adult CBA/J mouse cochleae using a suction pipette technique. Our goal was to determine whether pillar and Deiters' cells, the commonly targeted cells for hair cell replacement, express the genes known for encoding machinery for hair cell specializations in the apical, basolateral, and synaptic membranes. We showed that both pillar and Deiters' cells express these genes, with pillar cells being more similar to hair cells than Deiters' cells. The fact that adult pillar and Deiters' cells express the genes cognate to hair cell specializations provides a strong molecular basis for targeting these cells for mammalian hair cell replacement after hair cells are lost due to damage.

Grid scale Energy Storage Systems (ESSs) have received significant interest in recent years due to their ability to reduce/defer investment in transmission/distribution networks, as well their ability to act as primary reserve sources and provide emergency support to the transmission system. This paper investigates the dual-purposing of a HVDC-Scale Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC), allowing it to also act as an ESS. This has potential application in primary frequency response provision and other services such as de-coupled power oscillation damping. In the proposed topology a certain percentage of submodules (SM) within the MMC have their capacitor interfaced through a DC-DC converter to an Energy Storage Element (ESE), formed of a battery or ultracapacitor. By applying appropriate control, energy can be exchanged from the ESE to the main SM capacitor of each ESE-SM, and from there to either the AC or DC bus. It was found that for some operating points, an injection of circulating current was required to facilitate exchanging energy with the ESE-SMs. Analysis shows that, for instance, an additional power injection to AC or DC terminal of 0.1 p.u. (10%) is possible with only 4% of the SMs replaced by Full-Bridge ESE-SMs, and no additional SMs added.

Abstract-The alternate arm converter (AAC) was one of the first modular converter topologies to feature dc-side fault ridethrough capability with only a small penalty in power efficiency. However, the simple alternation of its arm conduction periods (with an additional short overlap period) resulted in 1) substantial sixpulse ripples in the dc current waveform, 2) large dc-side filter requirements, and 3) limited operating area close to an energy sweet spot. This paper presents a new mode of operation called extended overlap (EO) based on the extension of the overlap period to 60• , which facilitates a fundamental redefinition of the working principles of the AAC. The EO-AAC has its dc current path decoupled from the ac current paths, a fact allowing 1) smooth dc current waveforms, 2) elimination of dc filters, and 3) restriction lifting on the feasible operating point. Analysis of this new mode and EO-AAC design criteria are presented and subsequently verified with tests on an experimental prototype. Finally, a comparison with other modular converters demonstrates that the EO-AAC is at least as power efficient as a hybrid modular multilevel converter (MMC) (i.e., a dc fault ride-through-capable MMC), while offering a smaller converter footprint because of a reduced requirement for energy storage in the submodules and a reduced inductor volume.Index Terms-AC-DC power conversion, active filters, capacitive energy storage, HVDC transmission, power system faults, power transmission protection.

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The half-bridge-based modular multilevel converter (MMC) has emerged as the favored converter topology for voltage-source HVDC applications. The submodules within the converter can be constructed with either individual insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) modules or with series-connected IGBTs, which allows for different redundancy strategies to be employed. The main contribution of this paper is that an analytical method was proposed to analyze the reliability of MMCs with the consideration of submodule arrangements and redundancy strategies. Based on the analytical method, the relative merits of two approaches to adding redundancy, and variants created by varying the submodule voltage, are assessed in terms of overall converter reliability. Case studies were conducted to compare the reliability characteristics of converters constructed using the two submodule topologies. It is found that reliability of the MMC with series-connected IGBTs is higher for the first few years but then decreases rapidly. By assigning a reduced nominal voltage to the series valve submodule upon IGBT module failure, the need to install redundant submodules is greatly reduced