Modelação e monitorização do comportamento dinâmico de barragens abóbada: identificação modal automática

Trabalho Final de Mestrado elaborado no Laboratório de Engenharia Civil (LNEC) para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Civil pelo Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa no âmbito do protocolo de cooperação entre o ISEL e o LNEC

Sistema de reconhecimento de impressões digitais baseado em FPGA

Trabalho de Projeto para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia de Eletrónica e Telecomunicações

Avaliação em tempo real de forças em cabos

Dissertação elaborada para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Civil na Área de Especialização de Estruturas

Sistema de visão para aterragem automática de UAV

Dissertação para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica Ramo de Automação e Electrónica Industrial

Assimetria na volatilidade dos principais índices bolsistas de Portugal, Irlanda, Itália, Grécia e Espanha : um estudo comparativo

Mestrado em Controlo de Gestão e dos Negócios

How short and light can a simple pendulum be for classroom use?

We compare the period of oscillation of an ideal simple pendulum with the period of a more 'real' pendulum constituted of a rigid sphere and a rigid slender rod. We determine the relative error in the calculation of the local acceleration of gravity if the period of the ideal pendulum is use?d instead of the period of this real pendulum. © 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd..

Surface morphology and phase transformations of femtosecond laser-processed saphire

The morphological and structural modifications induced in sapphire by surface treatment with femtosecond laser radiation were studied. Single-crystal sapphire wafers cut parallel to the (0 1 2) planes were treated with 560 fs, 1030 nm wavelength laser radiation using wide ranges of pulse energy and repetition rate. Self-ordered periodic structures with an average spatial periodicity of similar to 300 nm were observed for fluences slightly higher than the ablation threshold. For higher fluences the interaction was more disruptive and extensive fracture, exfoliation, and ejection of ablation debris occurred. Four types of particles were found in the ablation debris: (a) spherical nanoparticles about 50 nm in diameter; (b) composite particles between 150 and 400 nm in size; (c) rounded resolidified particles about 100-500 nm in size; and (d) angular particles presenting a lamellar structure and deformation twins. The study of those particles by selected area electron diffraction showed that the spherical nanoparticles and the composite particles are amorphous, while the resolidified droplets and the angular particles, present a crystalline a-alumina structure, the same of the original material. Taking into consideration the existing ablation theories, it is proposed that the spherical nanoparticles are directly emitted from the surface in the ablation plume, while resolidified droplets are emitted as a result of the ablation process, in the liquid phase, in the low intensity regime, and by exfoliation, in the high intensity regime. Nanoparticle clusters are formed by nanoparticle coalescence in the cooling ablation plume. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Characterization and performance analysis of a VDFLL GNSS receiver architecture

A non-coherent vector delay/frequency-locked loop architecture for GNSS receivers is proposed. Two dynamics models are considered: PV (position and velocity) and PVA (position, velocity, and acceleration). In contrast with other vector architectures, the proposed approach does not require the estimation of signals amplitudes. Only coarse estimates of the carrier-to-noise ratios are necessary.

Quantitative description of the self-assembly of patchy particles into chains and rings

We numerically study a simple fluid composed of particles having a hard-core repulsion complemented by two patchy attractive sites on the particle poles. An appropriate choice of the patch angular width allows for the formation of ring structures which, at low temperatures and low densities, compete with the growth of linear aggregates. The simplicity of the model makes it possible to compare simulation results and theoretical predictions based on the Wertheim perturbation theory, specialized to the case in which ring formation is allowed. Such a comparison offers a unique framework for establishing the quality of the analytic predictions. We find that the Wertheim theory describes remarkably well the simulation results.

Rheology of the cytoskeleton as a fractal network

We model the cytoskeleton as a fractal network by identifying each segment with a simple Kelvin-Voigt element with a well defined equilibrium length. The final structure retains the elastic characteristics of a solid or a gel, which may support stress, without relaxing. By considering a very simple regular self-similar structure of segments in series and in parallel, in one, two, or three dimensions, we are able to express the viscoelasticity of the network as an effective generalized Kelvin-Voigt model with a power law spectrum of retardation times L similar to tau(alpha). We relate the parameter alpha with the fractal dimension of the gel. In some regimes ( 0 < alpha < 1), we recover the weak power law behaviors of the elastic and viscous moduli with the angular frequencies G' similar to G" similar to w(alpha) that occur in a variety of soft materials, including living cells. In other regimes, we find different power laws for G' and G".

Parallel hyperspectral coded aperture for compressive sensing on GPUs

The application of compressive sensing (CS) to hyperspectral images is an active area of research over the past few years, both in terms of the hardware and the signal processing algorithms. However, CS algorithms can be computationally very expensive due to the extremely large volumes of data collected by imaging spectrometers, a fact that compromises their use in applications under real-time constraints. This paper proposes four efficient implementations of hyperspectral coded aperture (HYCA) for CS, two of them termed P-HYCA and P-HYCA-FAST and two additional implementations for its constrained version (CHYCA), termed P-CHYCA and P-CHYCA-FAST on commodity graphics processing units (GPUs). HYCA algorithm exploits the high correlation existing among the spectral bands of the hyperspectral data sets and the generally low number of endmembers needed to explain the data, which largely reduces the number of measurements necessary to correctly reconstruct the original data. The proposed P-HYCA and P-CHYCA implementations have been developed using the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) and the cuFFT library. Moreover, this library has been replaced by a fast iterative method in the P-HYCA-FAST and P-CHYCA-FAST implementations that leads to very significant speedup factors in order to achieve real-time requirements. The proposed algorithms are evaluated not only in terms of reconstruction error for different compressions ratios but also in terms of computational performance using two different GPU architectures by NVIDIA: 1) GeForce GTX 590; and 2) GeForce GTX TITAN. Experiments are conducted using both simulated and real data revealing considerable acceleration factors and obtaining good results in the task of compressing remotely sensed hyperspectral data sets.

Parallel hyperspectral unmixing method on GPU

Many Hyperspectral imagery applications require a response in real time or near-real time. To meet this requirement this paper proposes a parallel unmixing method developed for graphics processing units (GPU). This method is based on the vertex component analysis (VCA), which is a geometrical based method highly parallelizable. VCA is a very fast and accurate method that extracts endmember signatures from large hyperspectral datasets without the use of any a priori knowledge about the constituent spectra. Experimental results obtained for simulated and real hyperspectral datasets reveal considerable acceleration factors, up to 24 times.