Browsing by Subject "Lifetime"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Dietary Effect on the Performance and Body Composition of the Generalist Insect Jerbivore, Heliothis virescens (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)(2011-10-21) Roeder, Karl AdamAll animals, including insect herbivores, eat to acquire nutrients that are essential for fueling physiological processes associated with growth, development, and reproduction. Protein and digestible carbohydrates are two nutrients required in large quantities by insect herbivores, but the amounts in which they occur in plants can be highly variable. In this thesis, I explore how the amounts and ratios of protein and digestible carbohydrate in an insect herbivore's food affect lifetime performance and body elemental composition. I do this by confining a generalist caterpillar, Heliothis virescens, to semi-synthetic foods with fixed protein-carbohydrate amounts and ratios. I show that foods with protein-carbohydrate ratios that match the self-selected protein-carbohydrate intake of final instar caterpillars correlate strongly with best performance, and that small deviations away from this optimal protein-carbohydrate ratio can result in large drop-offs in overall performance, particularly for males. I also show the importance of protein-carbohydrate balance over total macronutrient content. Finally, my results demonstrate that H. virescens caterpillars do not practice strict elemental homeostasis. My result, when contrasted with earlier work on caterpillars, suggests that hemimetabolous and holometabolous insect herbivores practice different degrees of elemental homeostasis.Item Evaluation of a high-pressure, coaxial spark gap for pulsed ring-down applications(2007-12) James, Colt; Dickens, James C.; Mankowski, John J.The design and jitter performance of a high pressure, coaxial spark gap for use in pulse ring-down applications is presented. Additional comparisons with trigatron style triggering are also presented. The spark gap is triggered by field distortion of a center plane electrode. The switch was tested up to 75 pulses per second (pps) with a maximum switching voltage of 50 kV in nitrogen. Analysis will focus on jitter measurements taken over the full lifetime of the switch. This paper presents the results of this analysis along with comparisons from the literature. Specifically, switch jitter and lifetime will be evaluated as a function of switch geometry as a whole and as a function of trigger electrode geometry.Item Measurement and analysis of BitTorrent(Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) Sadafal, VideshBitTorrent is assumed and predicted to be the world's largest Peer to Peer (P2P) network. Previous studies of the protocol mainly focus on its file sharing algorithm, and many relevant aspects of the protocol remain untouched. In the thesis, we conduct a number of experiments to explore those untouched aspects. We implement a BitTorrent crawler to collect data from trackers and peers, and statistically analyze it to understand the characteristics and behaviors of the BitTorrent protocol better. We find that the expected lifetime of a peer in the BitTorrent is 56.6 minutes and the activity is diurnal. Peers show strong preference towards a limited number of torrents, and 10% of torrents are responsible for 67% of traffic. The US contributes maximum number of peers to the BitTorrent and ?Torrent emerges as the favorite BitTorrent client. We measure the strength of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack using BitTorrent network and conclude that it is transient and weak. Finally we address and discuss the content locatability problem in BitTorrent and propose two solutions.