A produção de petróleo e gás em campos brasileiros é cada vez mais proveniente de regiões com águas profundas e situadas longe da costa, chegando a distâncias de mais de 100 km, como, por exemplo, na Bacia de Campos ou de Santos. Devido à falta de infra-estrutura e às características do petróleo desses campos, a cadeia de abastecimento e o sistema de exportação da produção possuem grande importância para a indústria offshore. Uma maneira usual para a exportação da produção é através de dutos submarinos, onde o óleo e/ou a gás flui das plataformas diretamente para o continente. Com esta infra-estrutura é possível a utilização de sistemas de produção sem capacidade de armazenamento e, conseqüentemente, torna-se desnecessário o uso de navios para o alívio da produção. No entanto, devido à qualidade do óleo e às distâncias entre os poços e a costa em alguns campos brasileiros, a utilização dos oleodutos mostra-se uma solução pouco viável. Por este motivo, é bastante comum o uso de FPSOs ou semi-submersíveis conectadas a sistemas auxiliares, como o FSO (Floating Storage and Offloading). Nas plataformas, outra característica importante e desejada é tornar viável o uso de um sistema de completação seca (árvore de Natal acima da linha dágua) com o objetivo de diminuir, significativamente, os custos operacionais envolvidos. Esse tipo de completação é utilizado, com excelência, por unidade do tipo TLWP ou Spar, devido ao baixo nível dos movimentos e acelerações observadas nestas plataformas. Entretanto, as condições ambientais severas amplificam as dificuldades para encontrar um sistema com grande capacidade de armazenamento e que permita o uso de completação seca. Neste contexto, pesquisadores e engenheiros estão sendo obrigados a desenvolver novos conceitos capazes de atender a essa demanda. Desta forma, uma nova solução, considerando um FPSO e uma TLWP operando a uma curta distância e trabalhando de forma acoplada com a conexão garantida por cabos sintéticos vem sendo estudada. Essencialmente, o grande atrativo deste conceito é o fato de que toda a produção e o armazenamento são concentrados no FPSO e a TLWP é responsável pela perfuração e extração dos hidrocarbonetos através de risers verticais. Assim o sistema trabalhando de forma conjunta possui capacidade de armazenamento e permite o uso da completação seca. Nesta dissertação, foi realizado um estudo sobre a evolução deste novo conceito, dividido em três fases. A primeira focada no dimensionamento do sistema de conexão e ancoragem das unidades e em uma investigação da interação hidrodinâmica entre as unidades de forma a mostrar a viabilidade do sistema. A segunda fase, focada na validação dos resultados por meio da comparação com os testes realizados no modelo em escala do NMRI (National Maritime Research Institute - Japão). Finalmente, a terceira fase, com foco no redimensionamento do sistema de amarração e no sistema de conexão, com base nos resultados obtidos na segunda fase. / The oil and gas production in Brazilian fields are commonly found in deep water and situated far away from the coast, reaching distances of more than 100 km as, for example, in the Campos Basin or Santos Basin. Due to the heavy oil and lack of pipeline infrastructure found in these fields, not only subsea equipments that must support high pressure but also logistics problems such as supply chain and production exportation system play an important role for the offshore industry. A usual way to export the production is to concentrate it in hubs of submarine pipelines which flows the oil or gas from the platforms to the continent. This infrastructure makes possible the use of no storage production systems and, consequently, releases the use of the shuttle tanks employment. However, due to the quality of the oil and the distances between the wells and the coast, some Brazilian fields do not allow the use of the pipelines to export their production. For this reason, is quite common to use FPSO and semi-submersible aided by auxiliary systems such as the FSO (Floating Storage and Offloading) units. Another important and desired characteristic of production platforms is to make it feasible to install a dry Christmas tree system aiming to decrease, significantly, operational costs involved. This feature is performed, with excellence, by TLWP and Spar units due to the low level of motions and accelerations observed in these platforms. Harsh environmental conditions can bring difficulties to find a solution of a system with both storage and dry tree system capability. In this context, researchers and engineers are being forced to develop new technological systems capable to support this demand. In this way, a new solution considering a FPSO and a TLWP coupled in a short distance by synthetic ropes has being studied. Essentially, the attractive feature of this concept is the fact that the production is performed by the FPSO whereas the TLWP is responsible to support the risers and drilling facilities turning the system coupled, equipped with a dry Christmas tree and with the possibility to storage the production. By now, the concept evolution has been divided in three phases. The first phase concerned about an advanced research focusing on the connection and mooring system development and the hydrodynamic interaction between the units and having in mind the verification of the concept feasibility. The second phase, concerned about the results validation by a comparison with scale model tests performed in the NMRI (National Maritime Research Institute Japan). Finally, the third phase, has the focus in the mooring and connection system resizing based on the results obtained on second phase.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / A wave rotor constant volume combustor (WRCVC) was designed and built as a collaborative work of Rolls Royce LibertyWorks, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), and Purdue University, and ran experimental tests at Purdue's Zucrow Laboratories in 2009. Instrumentation of the WRCVC rig inlet flow included temperature and pressure transducers upstream of the venturi and at the fuel delivery plane. Other instrumentation included exhaust pressures and temperatures. In addition, ion sensors, dynamic pressure sensors, and accelerometers were used to instrument the rotating hardware. The rig hardware included inlet guide vanes directly in front of the rotating hardware, which together with concern for damage potential, prevented use of any pressure transducers at the entrance to the rotor. For this reason, a complete understanding of the conditions at the WRCVC inlet is unavailable, requiring simulations of the WRCVC to estimate the inlet pressure at a specific operating condition based on airflow. The operation of a WRCVC rig test is a sequence of events over a short time span. These events include introduction of the main air flow followed by time-sequenced delivery of fuel, lighting of the ignition source, and the combustion sequence. The fast changing conditions in the rig inlet hardware make necessary a time-dependent computation of the rig inlet section in order to simulate the overall rig operation. The chosen method for computing inlet section temperature and pressure was a time-dependent lumped volume model of the inlet section hardware, using a finite difference modified Euler predictor-corrector method for computing the continuity and energy equations. This is coupled with perfect gas prediction of venturi air and fuel flow rates, pressure drag losses at the fuel nozzles, pressure losses by mass addition of the fuel or nitrogen purge, friction losses at the inlet guide vanes, and a correlation of the non-dimensional flow characteristics of the WRCVC. The flow characteristics of the WRCVC are computed by varying the non-dimensional inlet stagnation pressure and the WRCVC's operational conditions, assuming constant rotational speed and inlet stagnation temperature. This thesis documents the creation of a computer simulation of the entire WRCVC rig, to understand the pressure losses in the inlet system and the dynamic coupling of the inlet section and the WRCVC, so that an accurate prediction of the WRCVC rotor inlet conditions can be computed. This includes the computational development of the WRCVC upstream rig dynamic model, the background behind supporting computations, and results for one test sequence. The computations provide a clear explanation of why the pressures at the rotor inlet differ so much from the upstream measured values. The pressure losses correlate very well with the computer predictions and the dynamic response tracks well with the estimation of measured airflow. A simple Fortran language computer program listing is included, which students can use to simulate charging or discharging of a container.

[pt] Os problemas geotécnicos e geológicos envolvem a descrição do comportamento de materiais tais como solo e rocha e sua eventual interação com fluidos e estruturas. Em geral, a evolução desses problemas é caracterizada por grandes deformações e deslocamentos, descontinuidades, heterogeneidades e um comportamento constitutivo complexo. A abordagem deste tipo de problemas requer técnicas numéricas que levem em conta essas características, sem apresentar inconvenientes numéricos associados à distorção dos elementos como acontece no método dos elementos finitos (FEM). A presente tese desenvolve um algoritmo computacional baseado no método do ponto material (MPM) para aproximar a solução das equações governantes dos fenômenos mencionados. O algoritmo é baseado numa formulação dinâmica tridimensional do contínuo, considerando grandes deformações. Os amortecimentos de Rayleigh o local não viscoso são incorporados para modelar problemas dinâmicos e quase-estáticos. A geração dinâmica das poro-pressões é formulada assumindo o meio poroso saturado e um ponto material para discretizar a mistura. Diversas técnicas de suavização das pressões são avaliadas em problemas de impacto sobre meios saturados. Diferentes modelos constitutivos são implementados para modelar tanto a formação da superfície de ruptura e o processo de escoamento da massa de solo durante as instabilidades, quanto a gênese, evolução e quantificação de zona de falhas nos processos geológicos. Para a abordagem da discretização de problemas de escala geológica de grande número de partículas usando o MPM, uma metodologia é proposta e verificada com a discretização do deslizamento do Daguangbao, na China. Visando à diminuição do tempo computacional, o algoritmo é implementado segundo o paradigma de programação paralela. / [en] Geotechnical and geological problems involve the description of the behavior of materials such as soil and rock, and their eventual interaction with fluids and structures. In general, the evolution of these problems is characterized by large deformations and displacements, discontinuities, heterogeneities and complex constitutive behavior. Addressing these problems requires numerical techniques that take these characteristics into account, without numerical drawbacks associated with element distortion as occurs in the finite element method (FEM). In this thesis is developed a computational algorithm based on the material point method (MPM) to approximate the solution of the governing equations to the mentioned phenomena. The algorithm is based on a three-dimensional dynamic formulation of the continuum considering large deformations. Rayleigh damping and non-viscous local damping are incorporated to model dynamic and quasi-static problems. The dynamic generation of pore pressures is formulated assuming the saturated porous medium and a single material point to discretize the mixture. Different techniques are evaluated to mitigate spurious pressure in impact problems on saturated media. Different constitutive models are implemented to model the failure surface and the soil mass flow process during slope instabilities, as well as the genesis, evolution and failure zone quantification in geological processes. To address the discretization of large-scale geological problems using MPM, a methodology is proposed and validated with the discretization of the Daguangbao landslide, in China. In order to decrease the computational time, the algorithm is implemented according to the parallel programming paradigm.