On a self-start Darrieus wind turbine: blade design and field tests

This paper is about a design of an urban area Darrieus VAWT, having self-start ability due to an innovative profile design named EN0005, avoiding the need of extra components or external electricity feed-in. An approach is presented to study the ability of a blade profile to offer self-start ability. Methodologies applied for the blade body and for profile development are reported. Field tests and main conclusions are presented to persuade for the arrangement of this design. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Siderophore Production by Bacillus megaterium: Effect of Growth Phase and Cultural Conditions

Siderophore production by Bacillus megaterium was detected, in an iron-deficient culture medium, during the exponential growth phase, prior to the sporulation, in the presence of glucose; these results suggested that the onset of siderophore production did not require glucose depletion and was not related with the sporulation. The siderophore production by B. megaterium was affected by the carbon source used. The growth on glycerol promoted the very high siderophore production (1,182 μmol g−1 dry weight biomass); the opposite effect was observed in the presence of mannose (251 μmol g−1 dry weight biomass). The growth in the presence of fructose, galactose, glucose, lactose, maltose or sucrose, originated similar concentrations of siderophore (546–842 μmol g−1 dry weight biomass). Aeration had a positive effect on the production of siderophore. Incubation of B. megaterium under static conditions delayed and reduced the growth and the production of siderophore, compared with the incubation in stirred conditions.

Efficient schedulability tests for real-time embedded systems with urgent routines

Task scheduling is one of the key mechanisms to ensure timeliness in embedded real-time systems. Such systems have often the need to execute not only application tasks but also some urgent routines (e.g. error-detection actions, consistency checkers, interrupt handlers) with minimum latency. Although fixed-priority schedulers such as Rate-Monotonic (RM) are in line with this need, they usually make a low processor utilization available to the system. Moreover, this availability usually decreases with the number of considered tasks. If dynamic-priority schedulers such as Earliest Deadline First (EDF) are applied instead, high system utilization can be guaranteed but the minimum latency for executing urgent routines may not be ensured. In this paper we describe a scheduling model according to which urgent routines are executed at the highest priority level and all other system tasks are scheduled by EDF. We show that the guaranteed processor utilization for the assumed scheduling model is at least as high as the one provided by RM for two tasks, namely 2(2√−1). Seven polynomial time tests for checking the system timeliness are derived and proved correct. The proposed tests are compared against each other and to an exact but exponential running time test.

Syngas production by water electrolysis: preliminary tests on methane production

Master Thesis to obtain the Master degree in Chemical Engineering - Branch Chemical Processes

The role of public policy in health care promotion: a comparative perspective

Comunicação apresentada na 17th International conference on Health Promotio Hospitals and Health Services em Hersonissis, Crete, Grécia de 6-8 de maio de 2009

Chronic disease prevention and health promotion. Public policies and social network analysis of the hospitals services and oyhers health and social organizations to support joint action for children with diabetes

Comunicação apresentada na 18th Conference International of Health Promotion Hospitals & Health Services "Tackling causes and consequences of inequalities in health: contributions of health services and the HPH network", em Manchester de 14-16 de april de 2010

A estrutura de financiamento das PMEs exportadoras do setor do calçado

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada ao Instituto de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Contabilidade e Finanças, sob orientação do Dr. Carlos Mota

O futuro da liderança de topo na administração pública portuguesa. Forças motrizes e cenários possíveis.

Dissertação de mestrado em Administração Pública, orientada pelo Professor Doutor J. A. Oliveira Rocha apresentada na Escola de Economia e Gestão da Universidade do Minho, em 2006.

Promotion of gender equality and social inclusion of unemployed groups in Portuguese European Founds Frameworks (1990-2007): overview and critical reflection

Comunicação apresentada no 38º Congresso Mundial do Instituto Internacional de Sociologia, em Budapeste, Hungria, de 26 a 30 de Junho de 2008.

Induction of iron regulated proteins during normal growth of Neisseria meningitidis in a chemically defined medium

The expression of iron regulated proteins (IRPs) in vitro has been obtained in the past by adding iron chelators to the culture after bacterial growth, in the presence of an organic iron source. We have investigated aspects concerning full expression of the meningococcal IRPs during normal growth, in defined conditions using Catlin medium, Mueller Hinton and Tryptic Soy Broth (TSB). The expression of IRPs varied between different strains with respect to Ethylenediamine Di-ortho-Hidroxy-phenyl-acetic acid (EDDA) concentrations, and according to culture medium, and also between different lots of TSB. For each strain, a specific set of IRPs were expressed and higher EDDA concentrations, or addition of glucose, or use of different culture media did not resulted in a differential expression of IRPs. We were not able to grow N. meningitidis under normal growth conditions using Desferal. We looked for a good yield of outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) expressing IRPs in iron-deficient Catlin medium containing EDDA and Hemin. Culture for 32 h at 30ºC after growing for 16 h at 37ºC supported good bacterial growth. Bacterial lysis was noted after additional 24 h at 30ºC. Approximately 4 times more OMVs was recoverable from a culture supernatant after 24 h at 30ºC than from the cells after 16 h at 37ºC. The IRP were as well expressed in OMVs from culture supernatant obtained after 24 h at 30ºC as from the cells after 16 h at 37ºC.

From weak Allee effect to no Allee effect in Richards’ growth models

Population dynamics have been attracting interest since many years. Among the considered models, the Richards’ equations remain one of the most popular to describe biological growth processes. On the other hand, Allee effect is currently a major focus of ecological research, which occurs when positive density dependence dominates at low densities. In this chapter, we propose the dynamical study of classes of functions based on Richards’ models describing the existence or not of Allee effect. We investigate bifurcation structures in generalized Richards’ functions and we look for the conditions in the (β, r) parameter plane for the existence of a weak Allee effect region. We show that the existence of this region is related with the existence of a dovetail structure. When the Allee limit varies, the weak Allee effect region disappears when the dovetail structure also disappears. Consequently, we deduce the transition from the weak Allee effect to no Allee effect to this family of functions. To support our analysis, we present fold and flip bifurcation curves and numerical simulations of several bifurcation diagrams.

O tratamento contabilístico do goodwill nas empresas do PSI- 20

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentado ao Instituto de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Contabilidade e Finanças, sob orientação de Drª Mónica D’Orey

Symbolic dynamics and big bang bifurcation in Weibull-Gompertz-Fréchet's growth models

In this paper, motivated by the interest and relevance of the study of tumor growth models, a central point of our investigation is the study of the chaotic dynamics and the bifurcation structure of Weibull-Gompertz-Fréchet's functions: a class of continuousdefined one-dimensional maps. Using symbolic dynamics techniques and iteration theory, we established that depending on the properties of this class of functions in a neighborhood of a bifurcation point PBB, in a two-dimensional parameter space, there exists an order regarding how the infinite number of periodic orbits are born: the Sharkovsky ordering. Consequently, the corresponding symbolic sequences follow the usual unimodal kneading sequences in the topological ordered tree. We verified that under some sufficient conditions, Weibull-Gompertz-Fréchet's functions have a particular bifurcation structure: a big bang bifurcation point PBB. This fractal bifurcations structure is of the so-called "box-within-a-box" type, associated to a boxe ω1, where an infinite number of bifurcation curves issues from. This analysis is done making use of fold and flip bifurcation curves and symbolic dynamics techniques. The present paper is an original contribution in the framework of the big bang bifurcation analysis for continuous maps.

Explosion birth and extinction: Double big bang bifurcations and Allee effect in Tsoularis-Wallace's growth models

This work concerns dynamics and bifurcations properties of a new class of continuous-defined one-dimensional maps: Tsoularis-Wallace's functions. This family of functions naturally incorporates a major focus of ecological research: the Allee effect. We provide a necessary condition for the occurrence of this phenomenon of extinction. To establish this result we introduce the notions of Allee's functions, Allee's effect region and Allee's bifurcation curve. Another central point of our investigation is the study of bifurcation structures for this class of functions, in a three-dimensional parameter space. We verified that under some sufficient conditions, Tsoularis-Wallace's functions have particular bifurcation structures: the big bang and the double big bang bifurcations of the so-called "box-within-a-box" type. The double big bang bifurcations are related to the existence of flip codimension-2 points. Moreover, it is verified that these bifurcation cascades converge to different big bang bifurcation curves, where for the corresponding parameter values are associated distinct kinds of boxes. This work contributes to clarify the big bang bifurcation analysis for continuous maps and understand their relationship with explosion birth and extinction phenomena.

Integrated Management of Cloud Computing Resources

Lunacloud is a cloud service provider with offices in Portugal, Spain, France and UK that focus on delivering reliable, elastic and low cost cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions. The company currently relies on a proprietary IaaS platform - the Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure (PACI) - and wishes to expand and integrate other IaaS solutions seamlessly, namely open source solutions. This is the challenge addressed in this thesis. This proposal, which was fostered by Eurocloud Portugal Association, contributes to the promotion of interoperability and standardisation in Cloud Computing. The goal is to investigate, propose and develop an interoperable open source solution with standard interfaces for the integrated management of IaaS Cloud Computing resources based on new as well as existing abstraction libraries or frameworks. The solution should provide bothWeb and application programming interfaces. The research conducted consisted of two surveys covering existing open source IaaS platforms and PACI (features and API) and open source IaaS abstraction solutions. The first study was focussed on the characteristics of most popular open source IaaS platforms, namely OpenNebula, OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, as well as PACI and included a thorough inventory of the provided Application Programming Interfaces (API), i.e., offered operations, followed by a comparison of these platforms in order to establish their similarities and dissimilarities. The second study on existing open source interoperability solutions included the analysis of existing abstraction libraries and frameworks and their comparison. The approach proposed and adopted, which was supported on the conclusions of the carried surveys, reuses an existing open source abstraction solution – the Apache Deltacloud framework. Deltacloud relies on the development of software driver modules to interface with different IaaS platforms, officially provides and supports drivers to sixteen IaaS platform, including OpenNebula and OpenStack, and allows the development of new provider drivers. The latter functionality was used to develop a new Deltacloud driver for PACI. Furthermore, Deltacloud provides a Web dashboard and REpresentational State Transfer (REST) API interfaces. To evaluate the adopted solution, a test bed integrating OpenNebula, Open- Stack and PACI nodes was assembled and deployed. The tests conducted involved time elapsed and data payload measurements via the Deltacloud framework as well as via the pre-existing IaaS platform API. The Deltacloud framework behaved as expected, i.e., introduced additional delays, but no substantial overheads. Both the Web and the REST interfaces were tested and showed identical measurements. The developed interoperable solution for the seamless integration and provision of IaaS resources from PACI, OpenNebula and OpenStack IaaS platforms fulfils the specified requirements, i.e., provides Lunacloud with the ability to expand the range of adopted IaaS platforms and offers a Web dashboard and REST API for the integrated management. The contributions of this work include the surveys and comparisons made, the selection of the abstraction framework and, last, but not the least, the PACI driver developed.