[pt] A influência da vegetação na dispersão dos sinais rádio- móveis é caracterizada através dos parâmetros de dispersão no tempo como o retardo médio, o espalha-mento de retardo e a banda de coerência, e dos parâmetros de dispersão na freqüência como o Doppler médio, o espalhamento Doppler e o tempo de coerência. Através do desenvolvimento e implementação de uma técnica de sondagem em faixa larga apropriada, medições foram realizadas em dois ambientes, das quais os parâmetros desejados puderam ser extraídos, por processamento. De posse de tais parâmetros, os ambientes vegetados puderam ser caracterizados e analisados e, com isto, os projetos dos sistemas rádio-móveis em ambientes semelhantes podem ser otimizados, sendo alguns exemplos desta melhoria: taxas de transmissão de bits mais adequadas evitando a interferência intersimbólica, o super dimensiona-mento dos sistemas e o uso desnecessário de equalizadores; limites mínimos de separação estabelecidos para a diversidade em freqüência e em tempo e limiares de ruído convenientemente estabelecidos. / [en] The influence of vegetation in mobile radio signals dispersion is characterized by the time dispersion parameters like mean delay, delay spread and coerence bandwidth, and the frequency dispersion parameters like mean Doppler shift, Doppler spread and coerence time. An appropriate wideband sounding technique was developed and implemented. Using this technique, two vegeted environments were sounded. The results of calculated parameters from measurements were used to analyse and characterize the vegeted environments. Hence, mobile radio systems on these type of environments can be designed and optimized. Some examples of this optimization are: improvement on throughput, reduction of intersimbolic interference , unnecessary use of channel impairments avoidance techniques like equalizers, establishment of minimum limits for time and frequency diversity and the choice of suitable noise thresholds.

<p>The present dissertation focuses on two themes: (i) elastic instability of flow and (ii) elastic instability of microscopic filaments.</p> <p><br></p> <p>(i) The presence of macromolecules often leads to the viscoelastic nature of industrial and biological fluids. The flow of viscoelastic fluids in porous media is important in many industrial, geophysical, and biological applications such as enhanced oil recovery, groundwater remediation, biofilm formation, and drug delivery. The stretching of polymeric chains as the viscoelastic fluid passes through the microstructure of the porous media induces large elastic stresses, which leads to viscoelastic instability at the Weissenberg number greater than a critical value, where the Weissenberg number quantifies the ratio of elastic to viscous forces. Viscoelastic instability can lead to a time-dependent chaotic flow even at negligible inertia, which is sometimes also known as elastic turbulence due to its analogous features to traditional inertial turbulence. In the present thesis, we investigate the pore-scale viscoelastic instabilities and the flow states induced by the instabilities in symmetric and asymmetric geometries. We found that the topology of the polymeric stress field regulates the formation of different flow states during viscoelastic instabilities. Viscoelastic instability-induced flow states exhibit hysteresis due to the requirement of a finite time for the transformation of polymeric stress topology. Further, we study viscoelastic flows through ordered and disordered porous geometries and explore the effect of viscoelastic instability on sample-scale transport properties. Viscoelastic instability enhances transverse transport in ordered porous media and longitudinal transport in disordered porous media. We also derive a relationship between the polymeric stress field and the Lagrangian stretching field. The Lagrangian stretching field helps to predict the feature of flow states and transport in complex flows. The experimental measurement of the polymeric stress field is extremely challenging. The framework established here can be used to obtain the topology of the polymeric stress field directly from the easily measured velocity field.  </p> <p><br></p> <p><br></p> <p>(ii) The interaction between flow and elastic filaments plays an important role in sperm and bacterial motility and cell division. The sperm cells of many organisms use long elastic flagellum to propel themselves and also face complex flows and boundaries during their search for egg cells. Strong flows have the potential to mechanically inhibit flagellar motility through elastohydrodynamic interactions. We explore the effects of an extensional flow on the buckling dynamics of sperm flagella through detailed numerical simulations and microfluidic experiments. Compressional fluid forces lead to rich buckling dynamics of the sperm flagellum beyond a critical dimensionless sperm number, which represents the ratio of viscous force to elastic force. Shear flows navigate the sperm cells in complex geometries and flows. We have also studied the effect of flow strength and flagellar elastic deformation on the sperm trajectory in simple shear and Poiseuille flows.</p>