Análise e otimização de superfícies seletivas de Frequência utilizando redes neurais artificiais e algoritmos de otimização natural

The bidimensional periodic structures called frequency selective surfaces have been well investigated because of their filtering properties. Similar to the filters that work at the traditional radiofrequency band, such structures can behave as band-stop or pass-band filters, depending on the elements of the array (patch or aperture, respectively) and can be used for a variety of applications, such as: radomes, dichroic reflectors, waveguide filters, artificial magnetic conductors, microwave absorbers etc. To provide high-performance filtering properties at microwave bands, electromagnetic engineers have investigated various types of periodic structures: reconfigurable frequency selective screens, multilayered selective filters, as well as periodic arrays printed on anisotropic dielectric substrates and composed by fractal elements. In general, there is no closed form solution directly from a given desired frequency response to a corresponding device; thus, the analysis of its scattering characteristics requires the application of rigorous full-wave techniques. Besides that, due to the computational complexity of using a full-wave simulator to evaluate the frequency selective surface scattering variables, many electromagnetic engineers still use trial-and-error process until to achieve a given design criterion. As this procedure is very laborious and human dependent, optimization techniques are required to design practical periodic structures with desired filter specifications. Some authors have been employed neural networks and natural optimization algorithms, such as the genetic algorithms and the particle swarm optimization for the frequency selective surface design and optimization. This work has as objective the accomplishment of a rigorous study about the electromagnetic behavior of the periodic structures, enabling the design of efficient devices applied to microwave band. For this, artificial neural networks are used together with natural optimization techniques, allowing the accurate and efficient investigation of various types of frequency selective surfaces, in a simple and fast manner, becoming a powerful tool for the design and optimization of such structures

Um protocolo de comunicação multicast na camada de aplicação com Consciência de Localização

Internet applications such as media streaming, collaborative computing and massive multiplayer are on the rise,. This leads to the need for multicast communication, but unfortunately group communications support based on IP multicast has not been widely adopted due to a combination of technical and non-technical problems. Therefore, a number of different application-layer multicast schemes have been proposed in recent literature to overcome the drawbacks. In addition, these applications often behave as both providers and clients of services, being called peer-topeer applications, and where participants come and go very dynamically. Thus, servercentric architectures for membership management have well-known problems related to scalability and fault-tolerance, and even peer-to-peer traditional solutions need to have some mechanism that takes into account member's volatility. The idea of location awareness distributes the participants in the overlay network according to their proximity in the underlying network allowing a better performance. Given this context, this thesis proposes an application layer multicast protocol, called LAALM, which takes into account the actual network topology in the assembly process of the overlay network. The membership algorithm uses a new metric, IPXY, to provide location awareness through the processing of local information, and it was implemented using a distributed shared and bi-directional tree. The algorithm also has a sub-optimal heuristic to minimize the cost of membership process. The protocol has been evaluated in two ways. First, through an own simulator developed in this work, where we evaluated the quality of distribution tree by metrics such as outdegree and path length. Second, reallife scenarios were built in the ns-3 network simulator where we evaluated the network protocol performance by metrics such as stress, stretch, time to first packet and reconfiguration group time

Controle adaptativo robusto para um modelo desacoplado de um robô móvel

This thesis presents a new structure of robust adaptive controller applied to mobile robots (surface mobile robot) with nonholonomic constraints. It acts in the dynamics and kinematics of the robot, and it is split in two distinct parts. The first part controls the robot dynamics, using variable structure model reference adaptive controllers. The second part controls the robot kinematics, using a position controller, whose objective is to make the robot to reach any point in the cartesian plan. The kinematic controller is based only on information about the robot configuration. A decoupling method is adopted to transform the linear model of the mobile robot, a multiple-input multiple-output system, into two decoupled single-input single-output systems, thus reducing the complexity of designing the controller for the mobile robot. After that, a variable structure model reference adaptive controller is applied to each one of the resulting systems. One of such controllers will be responsible for the robot position and the other for the leading angle, using reference signals generated by the position controller. To validate the proposed structure, some simulated and experimental results using differential drive mobile robots of a robot soccer kit are presented. The simulator uses the main characteristics of real physical system as noise and non-linearities such as deadzone and saturation. The experimental results were obtained through an C++ program applied to the robot soccer kit of Microrobot team at the LACI/UFRN. The simulated and experimental results are presented and discussed at the end of the text

Um sistema para estimação da vazão de gás de poços produzindo por Plunger Lift para vaso separador de teste em plataformas de petróleo

This work intends to analyze the behavior of the gas flow of plunger lift wells producing to well testing separators in offshore production platforms to aim a technical procedure to estimate the gas flow during the slug production period. The motivation for this work appeared from the expectation of some wells equipped with plunger lift method by PETROBRAS in Ubarana sea field located at Rio Grande do Norte State coast where the produced fluids measurement is made in well testing separators at the platform. The oil artificial lift method called plunger lift is used when the available energy of the reservoir is not high enough to overcome all the necessary load losses to lift the oil from the bottom of the well to the surface continuously. This method consists, basically, in one free piston acting as a mechanical interface between the formation gas and the produced liquids, greatly increasing the well s lifting efficiency. A pneumatic control valve is mounted at the flow line to control the cycles. When this valve opens, the plunger starts to move from the bottom to the surface of the well lifting all the oil and gas that are above it until to reach the well test separator where the fluids are measured. The well test separator is used to measure all the volumes produced by the well during a certain period of time called production test. In most cases, the separators are designed to measure stabilized flow, in other words, reasonably constant flow by the use of level and pressure electronic controllers (PLC) and by assumption of a steady pressure inside the separator. With plunger lift wells the liquid and gas flow at the surface are cyclical and unstable what causes the appearance of slugs inside the separator, mainly in the gas phase, because introduce significant errors in the measurement system (e.g.: overrange error). The flow gas analysis proposed in this work is based on two mathematical models used together: i) a plunger lift well model proposed by Baruzzi [1] with later modifications made by Bolonhini [2] to built a plunger lift simulator; ii) a two-phase separator model (gas + liquid) based from a three-phase separator model (gas + oil + water) proposed by Nunes [3]. Based on the models above and with field data collected from the well test separator of PUB-02 platform (Ubarana sea field) it was possible to demonstrate that the output gas flow of the separator can be estimate, with a reasonable precision, from the control signal of the Pressure Control Valve (PCV). Several models of the System Identification Toolbox from MATLAB® were analyzed to evaluate which one better fit to the data collected from the field. For validation of the models, it was used the AIC criterion, as well as a variant of the cross validation criterion. The ARX model performance was the best one to fit to the data and, this way, we decided to evaluate a recursive algorithm (RARX) also with real time data. The results were quite promising that indicating the viability to estimate the output gas flow rate from a plunger lift well producing to a well test separator, with the built-in information of the control signal to the PCV

Uma arquitetura P2P baseada na hierarquia do endereçamento IP com roteamento unificado

There are some approaches that take advantage of unused computational resources in the Internet nodes - users´ machines. In the last years , the peer-to-peer networks (P2P) have gaining a momentum mainly due to its support for scalability and fault tolerance. However, current P2P architectures present some problems such as nodes overhead due to messages routing, a great amount of nodes reconfigurations when the network topology changes, routing traffic inside a specific network even when the traffic is not directed to a machine of this network, and the lack of a proximity relationship among the P2P nodes and the proximity of these nodes in the IP network. Although some architectures use the information about the nodes distance in the IP network, they use methods that require dynamic information. In this work we propose a P2P architecture to fix the problems afore mentioned. It is composed of three parts. The first part consists of a basic P2P architecture, called SGrid, which maintains a relationship of nodes in the P2P network with their position in the IP network. Its assigns adjacent key regions to nodes of a same organization. The second part is a protocol called NATal (Routing and NAT application layer) that extends the basic architecture in order to remove from the nodes the responsibility of routing messages. The third part consists of a special kind of node, called LSP (Lightware Super-Peer), which is responsible for maintaining the P2P routing table. In addition, this work also presents a simulator that validates the architecture and a module of the Natal protocol to be used in Linux routers

WI-BIO: redes de monitoramento de pacientes em ambientes de automação hospitalar utilizando o padrão IEEE 802.11

The monitoring of patients performed in hospitals is usually done either in a manual or semiautomated way, where the members of the healthcare team must constantly visit the patients to ascertain the health condition in which they are. The adoption of this procedure, however, compromises the quality of the monitoring conducted since the shortage of physical and human resources in hospitals tends to overwhelm members of the healthcare team, preventing them from moving to patients with adequate frequency. Given this, many existing works in the literature specify alternatives aimed at improving this monitoring through the use of wireless networks. In these works, the network is only intended for data traffic generated by medical sensors and there is no possibility of it being allocated for the transmission of data from applications present in existing user stations in the hospital. However, in the case of hospital automation environments, this aspect is a negative point, considering that the data generated in such applications can be directly related to the patient monitoring conducted. Thus, this thesis defines Wi-Bio as a communication protocol aimed at the establishment of IEEE 802.11 networks for patient monitoring, capable of enabling the harmonious coexistence among the traffic generated by medical sensors and user stations. The formal specification and verification of Wi-Bio were made through the design and analysis of Petri net models. Its validation was performed through simulations with the Network Simulator 2 (NS2) tool. The simulations of NS2 were designed to portray a real patient monitoring environment corresponding to a floor of the nursing wards sector of the University Hospital Onofre Lopes (HUOL), located at Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. Moreover, in order to verify the feasibility of Wi-Bio in terms of wireless networks standards prevailing in the market, the testing scenario was also simulated under a perspective in which the network elements used the HCCA access mechanism described in the IEEE 802.11e amendment. The results confirmed the validity of the designed Petri nets and showed that Wi-Bio, in addition to presenting a superior performance compared to HCCA on most items analyzed, was also able to promote efficient integration between the data generated by medical sensors and user applications on the same wireless network

Técnicas de computação natural para segmentação de imagens médicas

Image segmentation is one of the image processing problems that deserves special attention from the scientific community. This work studies unsupervised methods to clustering and pattern recognition applicable to medical image segmentation. Natural Computing based methods have shown very attractive in such tasks and are studied here as a way to verify it's applicability in medical image segmentation. This work treats to implement the following methods: GKA (Genetic K-means Algorithm), GFCMA (Genetic FCM Algorithm), PSOKA (PSO and K-means based Clustering Algorithm) and PSOFCM (PSO and FCM based Clustering Algorithm). Besides, as a way to evaluate the results given by the algorithms, clustering validity indexes are used as quantitative measure. Visual and qualitative evaluations are realized also, mainly using data given by the BrainWeb brain simulator as ground truth

Ambiente de simulação híbrido integrando hysys e rede industrial Foundation Fieldbus aplicado ao controle de uma coluna de destilação

The main purpose of this work is to develop an environment that allows HYSYS R chemical process simulator communication with sensors and actuators from a Foundation Fieldbus industrial network. The environment is considered a hybrid resource since it has a real portion (industrial network) and a simulated one (process) with all measurement and control signals also real. It is possible to reproduce different industrial process dynamics without being required any physical network modification, enabling simulation of some situations that exist in a real industrial environment. This feature testifies the environment flexibility. In this work, a distillation column is simulated through HYSYS R with all its variables measured and controlled by Foundation Fieldbus devices

Análise de desempenho baseada em simulação de redes WirelessHART

This dissertation describes the implementation of a WirelessHART networks simulation module for the Network Simulator 3, aiming for the acceptance of both on the present context of networks research and industry. For validating the module were imeplemented tests for attenuation, packet error rate, information transfer success rate and battery duration per station

Desenvolvimento de uma planta piloto para estudos de poços de petróleo produzindo por plunger lift

This document proposes to describe a pilot plant for oil wells equipped with plunger lift. In addition to a small size (21,5 meters) and be on the surface, the plant s well has part of its structure in transparent acrylic, allowing easy visualization of phenomena inherent to the method. The rock formation where the well draws its pilot plant fluids (water and air) is simulated by a machine room where they are located the compressor and water pump for the production of air and water. To keep the flow of air and water with known and controlled values the lines that connect the machine room to the wellhole are equipped with flow sensors and valves. It s developed a supervisory system that allows the user a real-time monitoring of pressures and flow rates involved. From the supervisor is still allowed the user can choose how they will be controlled cycles of the process, whether by time, pressure or manually, and set the values of air flow to the water used in cycles. These values can be defined from a set point or from the percentage of valve opening. Results from tests performed on the plant using the most common forms of control by time and pressure in the coating are showed. Finally, they are confronted with results generated by a simulator configured with the the pilot plant s feature

Desenvolvimento de um simulador de bombeio por cavidades progressivas

The method of artificial lift of progressing cavity pump is very efficient in the production of oils with high viscosity and oils that carry a great amount of sand. This characteristic converted this lift method into the second most useful one in oil fields production. As it grows the number of its applications it also increases the necessity to dominate its work in a way to define it the best operational set point. To contribute to the knowledge of the operational method of artificial lift of progressing cavity pump, this work intends to develop a computational simulator for oil wells equipped with an artificial lift system. The computational simulator of the system will be able to represent its dynamic behavior when submitted to the various operational conditions. The system was divided into five subsystems: induction motor, multiphase flows into production tubing, rod string, progressing cavity pump and annular tubing-casing. The modeling and simulation of each subsystem permitted to evaluate the dynamic characteristics that defined the criteria connections. With the connections of the subsystems it was possible to obtain the dynamic characteristics of the most important arrays belonging to the system, such as: pressure discharge, pressure intake, pumping rate, rod string rotation and torque applied to polish string. The shown results added to a friendly graphical interface converted the PCP simulator in a great potential tool with a didactic characteristic in serving the technical capability for the system operators and also permitting the production engineering to achieve a more detail analysis of the dynamic operational oil wells equipped with the progressing cavity pump

Simulador computacional do comportamento em regime de poços de petróleo equipados com gas-lift contínuo

Amongst the results of the AutPoc Project - Automation of Wells, established between UFRN and Petrobras with the support of the CNPq, FINEP, CTPETRO, FUNPEC, was developed a simulator for equipped wells of oil with the method of rise for continuous gas-lift. The gas-lift is a method of rise sufficiently used in production offshore (sea production), and its basic concept is to inject gas in the deep one of the producing well of oil transform it less dense in order to facilitate its displacement since the reservoir until the surface. Based in the use of tables and equations that condense the biggest number of information on characteristics of the reservoir, the well and the valves of gas injection, it is allowed, through successive interpolations, to simulate representative curves of the physical behavior of the existing characteristic variable. With a simulator that approaches a computer of real the physical conditions of an oil well is possible to analyze peculiar behaviors with very bigger speeds, since the constants of time of the system in question well are raised e, moreover, to optimize costs with assays in field. The simulator presents great versatility, with prominance the analysis of the influence of parameters, as the static pressure, relation gas-liquid, pressure in the head of the well, BSW (Relation Basic Sediments and Water) in curves of request in deep of the well and the attainment of the curve of performance of the well where it can be simulated rules of control and otimization. In moving the rules of control, the simulator allows the use in two ways of simulation: the application of the control saw software simulated enclosed in the proper simulator, as well as the use of external controllers. This implies that the simulator can be used as tool of validation of control algorithms. Through the potentialities above cited, of course one another powerful application for the simulator appears: the didactic use of the tool. It will be possible to use it in formation courses and recycling of engineers

Modelagem e controle adaptativo de uma planta didática de nível com instrumentação industrial

The control, automation and optimization areas help to improve the processes used by industry. They contribute to a fast production line, improving the products quality and reducing the manufacturing costs. Didatic plants are good tools for research in these areas, providing a direct contact with some industrial equipaments. Given these capabilities, the main goal of this work is to model and control a didactic plant, which is a level and flow process control system with an industrial instrumentation. With a model it is possible to build a simulator for the plant that allows studies about its behaviour, without any of the real processes operational costs, like experiments with controllers. They can be tested several times before its application in a real process. Among the several types of controllers, it was used adaptive controllers, mainly the Direct Self-Tuning Regulators (DSTR) with Integral Action and the Gain Scheduling (GS). The DSTR was based on Pole-Placement design and use the Recursive Least Square to calculate the controller parameters. The characteristics of an adaptive system was very worth to guarantee a good performance when the controller was applied to the plant

Simulador computacional para poços de petróleo com método de elevação artificial por bombeio mecânico

This work proposes a computer simulator for sucker rod pumped vertical wells. The simulator is able to represent the dynamic behavior of the systems and the computation of several important parameters, allowing the easy visualization of several pertinent phenomena. The use of the simulator allows the execution of several tests at lower costs and shorter times, than real wells experiments. The simulation uses a model based on the dynamic behavior of the rod string. This dynamic model is represented by a second order partial differencial equation. Through this model, several common field situations can be verified. Moreover, the simulation includes 3D animations, facilitating the physical understanding of the process, due to a better visual interpretation of the phenomena. Another important characteristic is the emulation of the main sensors used in sucker rod pumping automation. The emulation of the sensors is implemented through a microcontrolled interface between the simulator and the industrial controllers. By means of this interface, the controllers interpret the simulator as a real well. A "fault module" was included in the simulator. This module incorporates the six more important faults found in sucker rod pumping. Therefore, the analysis and verification of these problems through the simulator, allows the user to identify such situations that otherwise could be observed only in the field. The simulation of these faults receives a different treatment due to the different boundary conditions imposed to the numeric solution of the problem. Possible applications of the simulator are: the design and analysis of wells, training of technicians and engineers, execution of tests in controllers and supervisory systems, and validation of control algorithms

S-Educ: Um Simulador de Ambiente de Robótica Educacional em Plataforma Virtual

We propose a robotics simulation platform, named S-Educ, developed specifically for application in educational robotics, which can be used as an alternative or in association with robotics kits in classes involving the use of robotics. In the usually known approach, educational robotics uses robotics kits for classes which generally include interdisciplinary themes. The idea of this work is not to replace these kits, but to use the developed simulator as an alternative, where, for some reason, the traditional kits cannot be used, or even to use the platform in association with these kits. To develop the simulator, initially, we conducted research in the literature on the use of robotic simulators and robotic kits, facing the education sector, from which it was possible to define a set of features considered important for creating such a tool. Then, on the software development phase, the simulator S-Educ was implemented, taking into account the requirements and features defined in the design phase. Finally, to validate the platform, several tests were conducted with teachers, students and lay adults, in which it was used the simulator S-Educ, to evaluate its use in educational robotics classes. The results show that robotic simulator allows a reduction of financial costs, facilitate testing and reduce robot damage inherent to its use, in addition to other advantages. Furthermore, as a contribution to the community, the proposed tool can be used to increase adhesion of Brazilian schools to the methodologies of educational robotics or to robotics competitions