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Yes / Ionic liquids (ILs) are key materials for the development of a wide range of emerging technologies. Protic ionic liquids, an important class of ILs, have long been envisioned as promising anhydrous electrolytes for fuel cells. It is well known that in comparison to all other cations, protons exhibit abnormally high conductivity in water. Such superprotonic dynamics was expected in protic ionic conductors as well. However, many years of extensive studies led to the disappointing conclusion that this is not the case and most protic ionic liquids display subionic behavior. Therefore, the relatively low conductivity seems to be the main obstacle for the application of protic ionic liquids in fuel cells. Using dielectric spectroscopy, herein we report the observation of highly decoupled conductivity in a newly synthesized protic ionic conductor. We show that its proton transport is strongly decoupled from the structural relaxation, in terms of both temperature dependence and characteristic rates. This finding offers a fresh look on the charge transport mechanism in PILs and also provides new ideas for design of anhydrous materials with exceptionally high proton conductivity. / National Science Centre within the framework of the Opus project (Grant No. DEC 2011/03/B/ST3/02072). Financial assistance from FNP START. The LDRD Program of ORNL, managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. DOE. Support from the NSF under grant CHE-1213444.

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) has been associated with a variety of problems that include adverse health effects, reduction in visibility, damage to buildings and crops, and possible interactions with climate. Although stringent air quality regulations are in place, policy makers need efficient tools to test a wide range of control strategies. Sensitivity analysis provides predictions on how the interdependent concentrations of various PM2.5 components and also gaseous pollutant species will respond to specific combinations of precursor emission reductions. The Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ) was outfitted with the Decoupled Direct Method in 3D for calculating sensitivities of particulate matter (DDM-3D/PM). This method was evaluated and applied to high PM2.5 episodes in the Southeast United States. Sensitivities of directly emitted particles as well as those formed in the atmosphere through chemical and physical processing of emissions of gaseous precursors such as SO2, NOx, VOCs, and NH3 were calculated. DDM-3D/PM was further extended to calculate receptor oriented sensitivities or the Area of Influence (AOI). AOI analysis determines the geographical extent of relative air pollutant precursor contributions to pollutant levels at a specific receptor of interest. This method was applied to Atlanta and other major cities in Georgia. The tools developed here (DDM-3D/PM and AOI) provide valuable information to those charged with air quality management.

With the deregulation of power industry and the market competition, reliable power supply and secured system operation are major concerns of the independent system operator (ISO). Power system operation under deregulated environment is very complicated with various possibilities of decisions involved. A robust and fast network analysis tool is one of important functions of conventional EMS, and this function will be reserved for the on-line analysis to deal with varied behaviors of the new deregulated environment. Firstly, a multiple-frequency three-phase load flow model was developed in this dissertation. There are two new sub-models including the fundamental power flow (FPF) and harmonic frequency power flow (HPF) model. In FPF, models of electrical elements and injected power on buses were treated in the form of current injections in a transmission system. The standard Fourier analysis was used to deal with the harmonic loads to get injection currents. With harmonic currents as equivalent current sources, the HPF can be derived. Besides, the fast assumptive model and decoupled model of FPF and HPF, called AFPF, DFPF and DHPF, were also proposed to improve execution time of the load flow programs. Test results show that the proposed general-purpose methods are better performers than conventional power flow solutions and are very robust. Secondly, the novel method, Upstream Tracing Model (UTM) and Downstream Tracing Model (DTM), to trace the power flow in transmission systems based on the converged AC power flow solution was proposed. The method is formulated by using the transmission network structure, the equivalent current-injection and load-admittances from the engineering viewpoint. Four steps are used to trace the linear relationship between each line flow and generator injection power without any assumption and the counter flow can be traced out, then the power consumption on each load can be represented as generators¡¦ contribution. According to the result of tracing, the loss of each line can be allocated to each generator by using a fair line usage concept. This tracing algorithm can calculate each generator¡¦s contribution quickly and fairly, and can be integrated into the existent tariffs of charging for transmission losses and services.

Orientador: Dilson Amâncio Alves / Banca: Anna Diva Plasencia Lotufo / Banca: Edmárcio Antonio Belati / Resumo: Este trabalho apresenta o método de Newton desacoplado para o fluxo de carga continuado. O método foi melhorado por uma técnica de parametrização geométrica possibilitando assim o traçado completo das curvas P-V, e o cálculo do ponto de máximo carregamento de sistemas elétricos de potência, sem os problemas de mau condicionamento. O objetivo é o de apresentar de forma didática os passos envolvidos no processo de melhoria do método de Newton Desacoplado a partir da observação das trajetórias de solução do fluxo de carga. A técnica de parametrização geométrica que consiste na adição de uma equação de reta que passa por um ponto no plano formado pelas variáveis: tensão nodal de uma barra k qualquer e o fator de carregamento eliminam os problemas de singularidades das matrizes envolvidas no processo e ampliam o grupo das variáveis de tensão que podem ser usadas como parâmetro da continuação. Os resultados obtidos com a nova metodologia para o sistema teste do IEEE (14, 30, 57, 118 e 300 barras) e também para os sistemas reais de grande porte, o 638 barras do sistema Sul-Sudeste brasileiro e do sistema de 904 barras do sudoeste Americano, mostram que as características do método convencional são melhoradas na região do ponto de máximo carregamento e que a região de convergência ao redor da singularidade é sensivelmente aumentada. São apresentados vários testes com a finalidade de prover um completo entendimento do funcionamento do método proposto e também avaliar seu desempenho / Abstract: This work presents the decoupled Newton method for continuation power flow. The method was improved by using a geometric parameterization technique that allows the complete tracing of P-V curves, and the computation of maximum loading point of a power system, without ill-conditioning problems. The goal is to present in a clear and didactic way the steps involved in the development of the improved decoupled Newton method obtained from the observation of the geometrical behavior of power flow solutions. The geometric parameterization technique that consists of the addition of a line equation, which passes through a point in the plane determined by the bus voltage magnitude and loading factor variables, can eliminate the ill-conditioning problems of matrices used by the method and can enlarge the set of voltage variables that can be used as continuation parameter to P-V curve tracing. The method is applied to the IEEE systems (14, 30, 57, 118 and 300 buses) and two large real systems: the south-southeast Brazilian system (638 buses) and the 904-bus southwestern American system. The results show that the best characteristics of the conventional decoupled Newton's method are improved in the vicinity of the maximum loading point and therefore the region of convergence around it is enlarged. Several tests are presented with the purpose of providing a complete understanding of the behavior of the proposed method and also to evaluate its performance / Mestre

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:55:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 JoaoPFG_DISSERT.pdf: 1458535 bytes, checksum: fae41c0cfc4b0b09e65c1f69ec230a28 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-12-19 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / A Quadrotor is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with four rotors distributed on a simple mechanical "X"form structure. The aim of this work is to build and stabilize a Quadrotor aircraft in the roll, pitch and yaw angles at a certain altitude. The stabilization control approach is based on a transformation in the input variables in order to perform a decoupled control. The proposed strategy is based on breaking the control problem into two hierarchical levels: A lower level, object of this work, maintains the desired altitude an angles of the vehicle while the higher level establishes appropriate references to the lower level, performing the desired movements. A hardware and software architecture was specially developed and implemented for an experimental prototype used to test and validate the proposed control approach / Um Quadrirrotor ? um Ve?culo A?reo N?o Tripulado (VANT) dotado de quatro rotores distribu?dos nas extremidades de uma estrutura mec?nica simples em forma de "X". O objetivo desse trabalho ? construir e estabilizar uma aeronave desse tipo, com alta capacidade de carga, em uma determinada altitude, sob ?ngulos de rolagem, guinada e arfagem pr?-definidos. A abordagem de controle de estabiliza??o baseia-se numa transforma??o das vari?veis de entrada do sistema a fim de realizar o controle de forma desacoplada. A estrat?gia proposta se baseia na divis?o do problema de controle em dois n?veis hier?rquicos: o n?vel inferior, objeto deste trabalho, mant?m os ?ngulos e a altitude do ve?culo em valores desejados, enquanto o n?vel superior estabelece refer?ncias adequadas para o n?vel inferior, de forma a executar os movimentos desejados Uma arquitetura de hardware e software foi especialmente desenvolvida e implementada para um prot?tipo experimental usado para testar e validar a abordagem de controle proposta

Effective pollution mitigation is the key to successful air quality management. Although states invest millions of dollars to predict future air quality, the regulatory modeling and analysis process to inform pollution control strategy remains uncertain. Traditionally deterministic ‘bright-line’ tests are applied to evaluate the sufficiency of a control strategy to attain an air quality standard. A critical part of regulatory attainment demonstration is the prediction of future pollutant levels using photochemical air quality models. However, because models are uncertain, they yield a false sense of precision that pollutant response to emission controls is perfectly known and may eventually mislead the selection of control policies. These uncertainties in turn affect the health impact assessment of air pollution control strategies. This thesis explores beyond the conventional practice of deterministic attainment demonstration and presents novel approaches to yield probabilistic representations of pollutant response to emission controls by accounting for uncertainties in regional air quality planning. Computationally-efficient methods are developed and validated to characterize uncertainty in the prediction of secondary pollutant (ozone and particulate matter) sensitivities to precursor emissions in the presence of uncertainties in model assumptions and input parameters. We also introduce impact factors that enable identification of model inputs and scenarios that strongly influence pollutant concentrations and sensitivity to precursor emissions. We demonstrate how these probabilistic approaches could be applied to determine the likelihood that any control measure will yield regulatory attainment, or could be extended to evaluate probabilistic health benefits of emission controls, considering uncertainties in both air quality models and epidemiological concentration–response relationships. Finally, ground-level observations for pollutant (ozone) and precursor concentrations (oxides of nitrogen) have been used to adjust probabilistic estimates of pollutant sensitivities based on the performance of simulations in reliably reproducing ambient measurements. Various observational metrics have been explored for better scientific understanding of how sensitivity estimates vary with measurement constraints. Future work could extend these methods to incorporate additional modeling uncertainties and alternate observational metrics, and explore the responsiveness of future air quality to project trends in emissions and climate change.

My thesis deals with register allocation. During this phase, the compiler has to assign variables of the source program, in an arbitrary big number, to actual registers of the processor, in a limited number k. Recent works, for instance the thesis of F. Bouchez and S. Hack, have shown that it is possible to split in two different decoupled step this phase: the spill - store the variables into memory to release registers - followed by the registers assignment. These works demonstrate the feasibility of this decoupling relying on a theoretic framework and some assumptions. In particular, it is sufficient to ensure after the spill step that the number of variables simultaneously live is below k.My thesis follows these works by showing how to apply this kind of approach when real-world constraints come in play: instructions encoding, ABI (application binary interface), register aliasing. Different approaches are proposed. They allow either to ignore these problems or to directly tackle them into the theoretic framework. The hypothesis of the models and the proposed solutions are evaluated and validated using a thorough experimental study with the compiler of STMicroelectronics. Finally, all these works have been done with the constraints of modern compilers in mind, the JIT (just-in-time) compilation, where the compilation time et the memory footprint of the compiler are key factors. We strive to offer solutions that cope with these criteria or improve the result until a given budget is reached. We, in particular, used the SSA (static single assignment) form to define algorithm like tree scan that generalizes linear scan based approaches proposed for JIT compilation.

This thesis presents a parallel-series two-bridge DC/DC converter topology with the ability to operate with ZVS over a wide input and load range. The intended application is power conditioning systems (PCS) of photovoltaic (PV) arrays used in hybrid renewable energy system architectures. The proposed topology provides two degrees of freedom which allows the PV-PCS to regulate the DC-link voltage, while tracking the maximum power point (MPP) of the PV array. This topology distributes the main power into two bridges and the phase-shift between the two bridges and provides another degree of freedom for the PCS to track the MPP. The proposed topology is also able to achieve soft-switching over a wide range. The power conditioning system shows a modular structure to efficiently transfer the power to the load as the main power is divided between two bridges. In addition, the proposed control scheme provides complete decoupling between the input side controller from the output side controller in order to perform MPPT and regulate the the DC-link voltage simultaneously. A 2kW Experimental prototype has been provided to validate the feasibility and performance of the converter. Experimental results prove that the converter is able to regulate the DC-link voltage and track the maximum power extracted from the PV array simultaneously. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2012-04-18 19:51:43.405

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:22:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-09-23Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:48:55Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 magalhaes_em_me_ilha.pdf: 455261 bytes, checksum: c5f0181b55df616b30443981a524ebbc (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Este trabalho apresenta o método de Newton desacoplado para o fluxo de carga continuado. O método foi melhorado por uma técnica de parametrização geométrica possibilitando assim o traçado completo das curvas P-V, e o cálculo do ponto de máximo carregamento de sistemas elétricos de potência, sem os problemas de mau condicionamento. O objetivo é o de apresentar de forma didática os passos envolvidos no processo de melhoria do método de Newton Desacoplado a partir da observação das trajetórias de solução do fluxo de carga. A técnica de parametrização geométrica que consiste na adição de uma equação de reta que passa por um ponto no plano formado pelas variáveis: tensão nodal de uma barra k qualquer e o fator de carregamento eliminam os problemas de singularidades das matrizes envolvidas no processo e ampliam o grupo das variáveis de tensão que podem ser usadas como parâmetro da continuação. Os resultados obtidos com a nova metodologia para o sistema teste do IEEE (14, 30, 57, 118 e 300 barras) e também para os sistemas reais de grande porte, o 638 barras do sistema Sul-Sudeste brasileiro e do sistema de 904 barras do sudoeste Americano, mostram que as características do método convencional são melhoradas na região do ponto de máximo carregamento e que a região de convergência ao redor da singularidade é sensivelmente aumentada. São apresentados vários testes com a finalidade de prover um completo entendimento do funcionamento do método proposto e também avaliar seu desempenho / This work presents the decoupled Newton method for continuation power flow. The method was improved by using a geometric parameterization technique that allows the complete tracing of P-V curves, and the computation of maximum loading point of a power system, without ill-conditioning problems. The goal is to present in a clear and didactic way the steps involved in the development of the improved decoupled Newton method obtained from the observation of the geometrical behavior of power flow solutions. The geometric parameterization technique that consists of the addition of a line equation, which passes through a point in the plane determined by the bus voltage magnitude and loading factor variables, can eliminate the ill-conditioning problems of matrices used by the method and can enlarge the set of voltage variables that can be used as continuation parameter to P-V curve tracing. The method is applied to the IEEE systems (14, 30, 57, 118 and 300 buses) and two large real systems: the south-southeast Brazilian system (638 buses) and the 904-bus southwestern American system. The results show that the best characteristics of the conventional decoupled Newton’s method are improved in the vicinity of the maximum loading point and therefore the region of convergence around it is enlarged. Several tests are presented with the purpose of providing a complete understanding of the behavior of the proposed method and also to evaluate its performance