Luke Marsh of the University of Surrey Department of Mathematics and
Statistics recently successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled
"Nonlinear dynamics of the RL-diode circuit".  

Abstract:  The nonlinear second order differential equation which
describes the driven series RL-diode circuit, biased so as to operate
only in the depletion region, is studied. Under certain conditions this
differential equation, which is Duffing's equation but with quadratic
instead of cubic nonlinearity, is also found to crop up in other
research contexts, namely in the studies of ship roll and capsize, as
well as in describing travelling wave solutions of a perturbed
Korteweg-de Vries equation. The main aim here is to give a detailed
analysis of some properties of the solutions thereby gaining some
understanding the dynamics of this system.

The external examiner was Prof. Peter Kennedy from University College,
Cork.