The use of information and interactive processes in growth management

Tese de doutoramento em Engenharia do Ambiente, especialidade em Sistemas Sociais

Human risk assessment of benzene after a gasoline station fuel leak

OBJECTIVE: To assess the health risk of exposure to benzene for a community affected by a fuel leak. METHODS: Data regarding the fuel leak accident with, which occurred in the Brasilia, Federal District, were obtained from the Fuel Distributor reports provided to the environmental authority. Information about the affected population (22 individuals) was obtained from focal groups of eight individuals. Length of exposure and water benzene concentration were estimated through a groundwater flow model associated with a benzene propagation model. The risk assessment was conducted according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry methodology. RESULTS: A high risk perception related to the health consequences of the accident was evident in the affected community (22 individuals), probably due to the lack of assistance and a poor risk communication from government authorities and the polluting agent. The community had been exposed to unsafe levels of benzene (> 5 µg/L) since December 2001, five months before they reported the leak. The mean benzene level in drinking water (72.2 µg/L) was higher than that obtained by the Fuel Distributer using the Risk Based Corrective Action methodology (17.2 µg/L).The estimated benzene intake from the consumption of water and food reached a maximum of 0.0091 µg/kg bw/day (5 x 10-7 cancer risk per 106 individuals). The level of benzene in water vapor while showering reached 7.5 µg/m3 for children (1 per 104 cancer risk). Total cancer risk ranged from 110 to 200 per 106 individuals. CONCLUSIONS: The population affected by the fuel leak was exposed to benzene levels that might have represented a health risk. Local government authorities need to develop better strategies to respond rapidly to these types of accidents to protect the health of the affected population and the environment.

Networked embedded systems for active flow control in aircraft

Aerodynamic drag is known to be one of the factors contributing more to increased aircraft fuel consumption. The primary source of skin friction drag during flight is the boundary layer separation. This is the layer of air moving smoothly in the immediate vicinity of the aircraft. In this paper we discuss a cyber-physical system approach able of performing an efficient suppression of the turbulent flow by using a dense sensing deployment to detect the low pressure region and a similarly dense deployment of actuators to manage the turbulent flow. With this concept, only the actuators in the vicinity of a separation layer are activated, minimizing power consumption and also the induced drag.

Environmental data management in the Sado Estuary

Estuaries are perhaps the most threatened environments in the coastal fringe; the coincidence of high natural value and attractiveness for human use has led to conflicts between conservation and development. These conflicts occur in the Sado Estuary since its location is near the industrialised zone of Peninsula of Setúbal and at the same time, a great part of the Estuary is classified as a Natural Reserve due to its high biodiversity. These facts led us to the need of implementing a model of environmental management and quality assessment, based on methodologies that enable the assessment of the Sado Estuary quality and evaluation of the human pressures in the estuary. These methodologies are based on indicators that can better depict the state of the environment and not necessarily all that could be measured or analysed. Sediments have always been considered as an important temporary source of some compounds or a sink for other type of materials or an interface where a great diversity of biogeochemical transformations occur. For all this they are of great importance in the formulation of coastal management system. Many authors have been using sediments to monitor aquatic contamination, showing great advantages when compared to the sampling of the traditional water column. The main objective of this thesis was to develop an estuary environmental management framework applied to Sado Estuary using the DPSIR Model (EMMSado), including data collection, data processing and data analysis. The support infrastructure of EMMSado were a set of spatially contiguous and homogeneous regions of sediment structure (management units). The environmental quality of the estuary was assessed through the sediment quality assessment and integrated in a preliminary stage with the human pressure for development. Besides the earlier explained advantages, studying the quality of the estuary mainly based on the indicators and indexes of the sediment compartment also turns this methodology easier, faster and human and financial resource saving. These are essential factors to an efficient environmental management of coastal areas. Data management, visualization, processing and analysis was obtained through the combined use of indicators and indices, sampling optimization techniques, Geographical Information Systems, remote sensing, statistics for spatial data, Global Positioning Systems and best expert judgments. As a global conclusion, from the nineteen management units delineated and analyzed three showed no ecological risk (18.5 % of the study area). The areas of more concern (5.6 % of the study area) are located in the North Channel and are under strong human pressure mainly due to industrial activities. These areas have also low hydrodynamics and are, thus associated with high levels of deposition. In particular the areas near Lisnave and Eurominas industries can also accumulate the contamination coming from Águas de Moura Channel, since particles coming from that channel can settle down in that area due to residual flow. In these areas the contaminants of concern, from those analyzed, are the heavy metals and metalloids (Cd, Cu, Zn and As exceeded the PEL guidelines) and the pesticides BHC isomers, heptachlor, isodrin, DDT and metabolits, endosulfan and endrin. In the remain management units (76 % of the study area) there is a moderate impact potential of occurrence of adverse ecological effects and in some of these areas no stress agents could be identified. This emphasizes the need for further research, since unmeasured chemicals may be causing or contributing to these adverse effects. Special attention must be taken to the units with moderate impact potential of occurrence of adverse ecological effects, located inside the natural reserve. Non-point source pollution coming from agriculture and aquaculture activities also seem to contribute with important pollution load into the estuary entering from Águas de Moura Channel. This pressure is expressed in a moderate impact potential for ecological risk existent in the areas near the entrance of this Channel. Pressures may also came from Alcácer Channel although they were not quantified in this study. The management framework presented here, including all the methodological tools may be applied and tested in other estuarine ecosystems, which will also allow a comparison between estuarine ecosystems in other parts of the globe.

Casos especiais na avaliação de empresas

Mestrado em Controlo de Gestão e dos Negócios

Accessing complexity from genome information

This paper studies the information content of the chromosomes of 24 species. In a first phase, a scheme inspired in dynamical system state space representation is developed. For each chromosome the state space dynamical evolution is shed into a two dimensional chart. The plots are then analyzed and characterized in the perspective of fractal dimension. This information is integrated in two measures of the species’ complexity addressing its average and variability. The results are in close accordance with phylogenetics pointing quantitative aspects of the species’ genomic complexity.

How a cyber-physical system can efficiently obtain a snapshot of physical information even in the presence of sensor faults

We present a distributed algorithm for cyber-physical systems to obtain a snapshot of sensor data. The snapshot is an approximate representation of sensor data; it is an interpolation as a function of space coordinates. The new algorithm exploits a prioritized medium access control (MAC) protocol to efficiently transmit information of the sensor data. It scales to a very large number of sensors and it is able to operate in the presence of sensor faults.

Inverse dynamics based predictive control for unified power flow controllers without DC bus

This paper presents a new predictive digital control method applied to Matrix Converters (MC) operating as Unified Power Flow Controllers (UPFC). This control method, based on the inverse dynamics model equations of the MC operating as UPFC, just needs to compute the optimal control vector once in each control cycle, in contrast to direct dynamics predictive methods that needs 27 vector calculations. The theoretical principles of the inverse dynamics power flow predictive control of the MC based UPFC with input filter are established. The proposed inverse dynamics predictive power control method is tested using Matlab/Simulink Power Systems toolbox and the obtained results show that the designed power controllers guarantees decoupled active and reactive power control, zero error tracking, fast response times and an overall good dynamic and steady-state response.

Linear and sliding-mode control design for matrix converter-based unified power flow controllers

This paper presents the design and compares the performance of linear, decoupled and direct power controllers (DPC) for three-phase matrix converters operating as unified power flow controllers (UPFC). A simplified steady-state model of the matrix converter-based UPFC fitted with a modified Venturini high-frequency pulse width modulator is first used to design the linear controllers for the transmission line active (P) and reactive (Q) powers. In order to minimize the resulting cross coupling between P and Q power controllers, decoupled linear controllers (DLC) are synthesized using inverse dynamics linearization. DPC are then developed using sliding-mode control techniques, in order to guarantee both robustness and decoupled control. The designed P and Q power controllers are compared using simulations and experimental results. Linear controllers show acceptable steady-state behaviour but still exhibit coupling between P and Q powers in transient operation. DLC are free from cross coupling but are parameter sensitive. Results obtained by DPC show decoupled power control with zero error tracking and faster responses with no overshoot and no steady-state error. All the designed controllers were implemented using the same digital signal processing hardware.

Ubiquitous computing and natural interfaces for environmental information

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas Ambientais

Information technology service management: an experimental approach towards IT service prediction

Dissertation presented to obtain a Masters degree in Computer Science

Hospitalization flow in the public and private systems in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil

OBJECTIVE To describe the migration flows of demand for public and private hospital care among the health regions of the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. METHODS Study based on a database of hospitalizations in the public and private systems of the state of Sao Paulo, Southeastern Brazil, in 2006. We analyzed data from 17 health regions of the state, considering people hospitalized in their own health region and those who migrated outwards (emigration) or came from other regions (immigration). The index of migration effectiveness of patients from both systems was estimated. The coverage (hospitalization coefficient) was analyzed in relation to the number of inpatient beds per population and the indexes of migration effectiveness. RESULTS The index of migration effectiveness applied to the hospital care demand flow allowed characterizing health regions with flow balance, with high emigration of public and private patients, and with high attraction of public and private patients. CONCLUSIONS There are differences in hospital care access and opportunities among health regions in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Evidence for non-coaxiality of ferrimagnetic and paramagnetic fabrics, developed during magma flow and cooling in a thick mafic dyke

A detailed analysis of fabrics of the chilled margin of a thick dolerite dyke (Foum Zguid dyke, Southern Morocco) was performed in order to better understand the development of sub-fabrics during dyke emplacement and cooling. AMS data were complemented with measurements of paramagnetic and ferrimagnetic fabrics (measured with high field torque magnetometer), neutron texture and microstructural analyses. The ferrimagnetic and AMS fabrics are similar, indicating that the ferrimagnetic minerals dominate the AMS signal. The paramagnetic fabric is different from the previous ones. Based on the crystallization timing of the different mineralogical phases, the paramagnetic fabric appears related to the upward flow, while the ferrimagnetic fabric rather reflects the late-stage of dyke emplacement and cooling stresses. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Extensible metadata repository for information systems

Thesis submitted to Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Computer Science

Forest cover monitoring in the Bara district (Nepal) with remote sensing and geographic information systems

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies