Estudo numérico do comportamento de muros de arrimo em alvenaria estrutural de blocos vazados

Usually masonry structures has low tension strength, hence the design to flexural efforts can results in high reinforcement ratio, specification of high unit and prism strength, structural members with larger section dimensions and modification in structural arrangement to be possible to use masonry members. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the stiffness, the efforts distribution and the effect of horizontal elements (girders) and vertical elements (counterforts) distribution on the behavior of masonry blocks retaining walls. For this purpose, numerical modeling was performed on typical retaining wall arrangements by varying the amount and placement of horizontal and vertical elements, beyond includes elements simulating the reactions of the soil supporting the foundation of the wall. The numerical modeling also include the macro modeling strategy in which the units, mortar and grout are discretized by a standard volume that represents the masonry elastic behavior. Also, numerical model results were compared with those ones of simplified models usually adopted in bending design of masonry elements. The results show horizontal displacements, principal and shear stresses distribution, and bending moments diagrams. From the analysis it was concluded that quantity and manner of distribution of the girders are both important factors to the panel flexural behavior, the inclusion of the foundation changed significantly the behavior of the wall, especially the horizontal displacements, and has been proposed a new way of considering the flanges section of the counterforts

Estudo numérico de escoamento turbulento em padrão anular gás-líquido em dutos verticais

Multiphase flows in ducts can adopt several morphologies depending on the mass fluxes and the fluids properties. Annular flow is one of the most frequently encountered flow patterns in industrial applications. For gas liquid systems, it consists of a liquid film flowing adjacent to the wall and a gas core flowing in the center of the duct. This work presents a numerical study of this flow pattern in gas liquid systems in vertical ducts. For this, a solution algorithm was developed and implemented in FORTRAN 90 to numerically solve the governing transport equations. The mass and momentum conservation equations are solved simultaneously from the wall to the center of the duct, using the Finite Volumes Technique. Momentum conservation in the gas liquid interface is enforced using an equivalent effective viscosity, which also allows for the solution of both velocity fields in a single system of equations. In this way, the velocity distributions across the gas core and the liquid film are obtained iteratively, together with the global pressure gradient and the liquid film thickness. Convergence criteria are based upon satisfaction of mass balance within the liquid film and the gas core. For system closure, two different approaches are presented for the calculation of the radial turbulent viscosity distribution within the liquid film and the gas core. The first one combines a k- Ɛ one-equation model and a low Reynolds k-Ɛ model. The second one uses a low Reynolds k- Ɛ model to compute the eddy viscosity profile from the center of the duct right to the wall. Appropriate interfacial values for k e Ɛ are proposed, based on concepts and ideas previously used, with success, in stratified gas liquid flow. The proposed approaches are compared with an algebraic model found in the literature, specifically devised for annular gas liquid flow, using available experimental results. This also serves as a validation of the solution algorithm

Parâmetro de regularização em problemas inversos: estudo numérico com a transformada de Radon

In general, an inverse problem corresponds to find a value of an element x in a suitable vector space, given a vector y measuring it, in some sense. When we discretize the problem, it usually boils down to solve an equation system f(x) = y, where f : U Rm ! Rn represents the step function in any domain U of the appropriate Rm. As a general rule, we arrive to an ill-posed problem. The resolution of inverse problems has been widely researched along the last decades, because many problems in science and industry consist in determining unknowns that we try to know, by observing its effects under certain indirect measures. Our general subject of this dissertation is the choice of Tykhonov´s regulaziration parameter of a poorly conditioned linear problem, as we are going to discuss on chapter 1 of this dissertation, focusing on the three most popular methods in nowadays literature of the area. Our more specific focus in this dissertation consists in the simulations reported on chapter 2, aiming to compare the performance of the three methods in the recuperation of images measured with the Radon transform, perturbed by the addition of gaussian i.i.d. noise. We choosed a difference operator as regularizer of the problem. The contribution we try to make, in this dissertation, mainly consists on the discussion of numerical simulations we execute, as is exposed in Chapter 2. We understand that the meaning of this dissertation lays much more on the questions which it raises than on saying something definitive about the subject. Partly, for beeing based on numerical experiments with no new mathematical results associated to it, partly for being about numerical experiments made with a single operator. On the other hand, we got some observations which seemed to us interesting on the simulations performed, considered the literature of the area. In special, we highlight observations we resume, at the conclusion of this work, about the different vocations of methods like GCV and L-curve and, also, about the optimal parameters tendency observed in the L-curve method of grouping themselves in a small gap, strongly correlated with the behavior of the generalized singular value decomposition curve of the involved operators, under reasonably broad regularity conditions in the images to be recovered