Simulação de Escoamentos Atmosféricos para Estudo de Parques Eólicos: Estudo comparativo dos softwares OpenFOAM e Windie

A presente tese tem como principal objetivo a comparação entre dois software de CFD (Computer Fluid Dynamics) na simulação de escoamentos atmosféricos com vista à sua aplicação ao estudo e caracterização de parques eólicos. O software em causa são o OpenFOAM (Open Field Operation and Manipulation) - freeware open source genérico - e o Windie, ferramenta especializada no estudo de parques eólicos. Para este estudo foi usada a topografia circundante a um parque eólico situado na Grécia, do qual dispúnhamos de resultados de uma campanha de medições efetuada previamente. Para este _m foram usados procedimentos e ferramentas complementares ao Open-FOAM, desenvolvidas por da Silva Azevedo (2013) adequados para a realização do pré-processamento, extração de dados e pós-processamento, aplicados na simulação do caso pratico. As condições de cálculo usadas neste trabalho limitaram-se às usadas na simulação de escoamentos previamente simulados pelo software Windie: condições de escoamento turbulento, estacionário, incompressível e em regime não estratificado, com o recurso ao modelo de turbulência RaNS (Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes ) k - E atmosférico. Os resultados de ambas as simulações - OpenFOAM e Windie - foram comparados com resultados de uma campanha de medições, através dos valores de speed-up e intensidade turbulenta nas posições dos anemómetros.

TEC4SEA - A Modular Platform for Research, Test and Validation of Technologies Supporting a Sustainable Blue Economy

This paper presents the TEC4SEA research infrastructure created in Portugal to support research, development, and validation of marine technologies. It is a multidisciplinary open platform, capable of supporting research, development, and test of marine robotics, telecommunications, and sensing technologies for monitoring and operating in the ocean environment. Due to the installed research facilities and its privileged geographic location, it allows fast access to deep sea, and can support multidisciplinary research, enabling full validation and evaluation of technological solutions designed for the ocean environment. It is a vertically integrated infrastructure, in the sense that it possesses a set of skills and resources which range from pure conceptual research to field deployment missions, with strong industrial and logistic capacities in the middle tier of prototype production. TEC4SEA is open to the entire scientific and enterprise community, with a free access policy for researchers affiliated with the research units that ensure its maintenance and sustainability. The paper describes the infrastructure in detail, and discusses associated research programs, providing a strategic vision for deep sea research initiatives, within the context of both the Portuguese National Ocean Strategy and European Strategy frameworks.

Flexible manufacturing field trial

Within the European project R-Fieldbus (http://www.hurray.isep.ipp.pt/activities/rfieldbus/), an industrial manufacturing field trial was developed. This field trial was conceived as a demonstration test bed for the technologies developed during the project. Because the R-Fieldbus field trial included prototype hardware devices, the purpose of this equipment changed and since the conclusion of the project, several new technologies also emerged, therefore an update of the field trial was required. This document describes an update of the manufacturing field trial. The purpose of this update, the changes and improvements introduced are described in the document. Additionally, this document also provides a reliable source of documentation for the equipment, configuration and software components of the manufacturing field trial.

On the development of a test-bed application for the ART-WiSe architecture

The ART-WiSe (Architecture for Real-Time communications in Wireless Sensor Networks) framework aims at the design of new communication architectures and mechanisms for time-sensitive Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We adopted a two-tiered architecture where an overlay Wireless Local Area Network (Tier 2) serves as a backbone for a WSN (Tier 1), relying on existing standard communication protocols and commercial-off-the-shell (COTS) technologies – IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee for Tier 1 and IEEE 802.11 for Tier 2. In this line, a test-bed application is being developed for assessing, validating and demonstrating the ART-WiSe architecture. A pursuit-evasion application was chosen since it fulfils a number of requirements, namely it is feasible and appealing and imposes some stress to the architecture in terms of timeliness. To develop the testbed based on the previously referred technologies, an implementation of the IEEE 8021.5.4/ZigBee protocols is being carried out, since there is no open source available to the community. This paper highlights some relevant aspects of the ART-WiSe architecture, provides some intuition on the protocol stack implementation and presents a general view over the envisaged test-bed application.

Using test infrastructures for (remote) online evaluation of the sensitivity to SEUs of FPGAs

This paper proposes an online mechanism that can evaluate the sensitivity of single event upsets (SEUs) of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The online detection mechanism cyclically reads and compares the values form the external and internal configuration memories, taking into account the mask information. This remote detection method also signals any mismatch as a result of a SEU that affects both used and not-used FPGA parts, which maximizes the monitored area. By utilizing an external, Web-accessible controller that is connected to the test infrastructure, the possibility of running the same operation in a remote manner is enabled. Moreover, the need for a local memory to store the mask values is also eliminated.

Field experiments for marine casualty detection with autonomous surface vehicles

In this paper we present a set of field tests for detection of human in the water with an unmanned surface vehicle using infrared and color cameras. These experiments aimed to contribute in the development of victim target tracking and obstacle avoidance for unmanned surface vehicles operating in marine search and rescue missions. This research is integrated in the work conducted in the European FP7 research project Icarus aiming to develop robotic tools for large scale rescue operations. The tests consisted in the use of the ROAZ unmanned surface vehicle equipped with a precision GPS system for localization and both visible spectrum and IR cameras to detect the target. In the experimental setup, the test human target was deployed in the water wearing a life vest and a diver suit (thus having lower temperature signature in the body except hands and head) and was equipped with a GPS logger. Multiple target approaches were performed in order to test the system with different sun incidence relative angles. The experimental setup, detection method and preliminary results from the field trials performed in the summer of 2013 in Sesimbra, Portugal and in La Spezia, Italy are also presented in this work.