An adaptive remeshing algorithm has been developed for multiphase flow simulations using the moving-mesh interface tracking (MMIT) technique. The edge-swapping algorithm uses the Delaunay criterion (in 2D) and a dynamic programming technique (in 3D) to maximize the quality of mesh primitives surrounding edges in the mesh, and performs local remeshing to minimize interpolation errors. Edge bisection and contraction operations are also performed to adjust the mesh resolution around important features like fluid-interfaces, driven by a local length scale estimation algorithm that is efficient and easily parallelized. Flow-field interpolation after reconnection is achieved using a conservative, second-order accurate remapping scheme that can be extended to arbitrary mesh pairs. To minimize the number of mesh reconnection operations, vertices in the mesh are also moved in a manner that optimizes the quality of cells at every time step, using a spring-analogy based Laplacian smoother for surface meshes, and an optimization-based smoothing approach for interior points. To facilitate the simulation of large-scale problems, all smoothing and reconnection algorithms in this work have been parallelized for shared- and distributed-memory paradigms. This approach allows meshes to undergo very large deformations which are characteristic of multiphase flows, and the method is versatile enough to extend its applicability to a broad range of problems including error-driven mesh refinement, reciprocating machinery, fluid-structure interation, and wing flapping simulations.

A new concept of current sensor reduction technique called multi-branch current sensing technique (MCST) is proposed in this dissertation. In the proposed current sensing method, one more branch currents are simultaneously measured several times in a single switching cycle by using a single current sensor. After that, the current reconstruction algorithm is applied to obtain all phase currents information. Compared to traditional single current sensor techniques (SCSTs), the proposed method samples the output of the current sensor regularly, and the current sensing dead-zone is dramatically reduced. Since the current sampling is performed periodically, its implementation using a digital controller is extremely simple. Moreover, the periodical dead-zone and the dead-zone near the origin of the voltage vector space which have been a big problem in the existing methods can be completely eliminated. Accordingly, there is no need to have a complicated vector reconfiguration or current estimation algorithm. The proposed MCST also takes the advantages of a SCST such as reduced cost and elimination of the sensor gain discrepancy problem in the multiple current sensor method. The fundamental concept, implementation issues, and limitation of the proposed MCST are described based on three-phase systems first. After that, the proposed MCST is adopted to two-phase inverters and multi-phase dc-dc converters with little modifications. Computer simulations and hardware experiments have been conducted for a three-phase boost converter, a three-phase motor drive system, a two-phase two-leg inverter, a two-phase four-leg inverter with bipolar modulation, a two-phase four-leg inverter with unipolar modulation, and a four-phase dc-dc converter applications. From the simulations and the experimental results, the feasibilities of the proposed method mentioned above are fully verified. / Ph. D.

Organosilicon compounds, which are heavily utilized in personal care products, are typically present, sometimes in high concentrations in the influent of wastewater treatment facilities. During anaerobic sludge digestion, these compounds volatilize and enter the methane gas recovery stream. As the methane is combusted for energy cogeneration, these compounds become oxidized to microcrystalline silicon dioxide and cause damage and potential failure of expensive infrastructure. Adsorption and other catchment methods are typically utilized for removal of these volatilized compounds in order to mitigate their entrance into methane combustion systems. This research investigated the effect of phased anaerobic digestion, specifically acid-gas digestion, on the behavior of the volatilization of these organosilicon compounds, particularly octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane (D4) and decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (D5) as these are the most abundant volatile silicone compounds present in sludge. A bench scale acid reactor anaerobic digester was operated at varying solids retention times and temperatures in order to quantify biogas effects generated in the downstream gas reactor, which was operated at a constant mesophilic conditions. Results of the research indicated that the addition of an acid reactor did not cause a change in behavior of the D4 and D5 siloxane volatilization in the downstream gas reactor. However, it was observed that hydrogen sulfide gas was decreased in the gas reactor when an acid reactor was utilized, which could permit decreased corrosivity of biogas recovery. Cumulative volatile solids reduction and gas reactor methane yield data did not indicate an enhancement due to utilization of acid-gas digestion. / Master of Science

During intense rain events a stormwater system can fill rapidly and undergo a transition from open channel flow to pressurized flow. This transition can create large discrete pockets of trapped air in the system. These pockets are pressurized in the horizontal reaches of the system and then are released through vertical vents. In extreme cases, the transition and release of air pockets can create a geyser feature. The current models are inadequate for simulating mixed flows with complicated air-water interactions, such as geysers. Additionally, the simulation of air escaping in the vertical dropshaft is greatly simplified, or completely ignored, in the existing models. In this work a two-phase numerical model solving the Navier-Stokes equations is developed to investigate the key factors that form geysers. A projection method is used to solve the Navier-Stokes Equation. An advanced two-phase flow model, Volume of Fluid (VOF), is implemented in the Navier-Stokes solver to capture and advance the interface. This model has been validated with standard two-phase flow test problems that involve significant interface topology changes, air entrainment and violent free surface motion. The results demonstrate the capability of handling complicated two-phase interactions. The numerical results are compared with experimental data and theoretical solutions. The comparisons consistently show satisfactory performance of the model. The model is applied to a real stormwater system and accurately simulates the pressurization process in a horizontal channel. The two-phase model is applied to simulate air pockets rising and release motion in a vertical riser. The numerical model demonstrates the dominant factors that contribute to geyser formation, including air pocket size, pressurization of main pipe and surcharged state in the vertical riser. It captures the key dynamics of two-phase flow in the vertical riser, consistent with experimental results, suggesting that the code has an excellent potential of extending its use to practical applications.

Geological Carbon Storage (GCS) is considered as one of the key techniques to reduce the rate of atmospheric emissions of CO2 and thereby to contribute to controlling the global warming. A successful application of a GCS project requires the capability of the formation to trap CO2 for a long term. In this context, processes related to CO2 trapping and also possible leakage of CO2 to the near surface environment need to be understood. The overall aim of this thesis is to understand the flow and transport of CO2 through porous media in the context of geological storage of CO2. The entire range of scales, including the pore scale, the laboratory scale, the field experiment scale and the industrial scale of CO2 injection operation are addressed, and some of the key processes investigated by means of experiments and modeling.  First, a numerical model and laboratory experimental setup were developed to investigate the CO2 gas flow, mimicking the system in the near-surface conditions in case a leak from the storage formation should occur. The system specifically addressed the coupled flow and mass transport of gaseous CO2 both in the porous domain as well as the free flow domain above it. The comparison of experiments and modelling results showed a very good agreement indicating that the model developed can be applied to evaluate monitoring and surface detection of potential CO2 leakage. Second, the field scale CO2 injection test carried out in a shallow aquifer in Maguelone, France was analyzed and modeled. The results showed that Monte Carlo simulations accounting for the heterogeneity effects of the permeability field did capture the key observations of the monitoring data, while a homogeneous model could not represent them. Third, a numerical model based on phase-field method was developed and model simulations carried out addressing the effect of wettability on CO2-brine displacement at the pore-scale. The results show that strongly water-wet reservoirs provide a better potential for the dissolution trapping, due to the increase of interface between CO2 and brine with very low contact angles. The results further showed that strong water-wet conditions also imply a strong capillary effect, which is important for residual trapping of CO2. Finally, numerical model development and model simulations were carried out to address the large scale geological storage of CO2 in the presence of impurity gases in the CO2 rich phase. The results showed that impurity gases N2 and CH4 affected the spatial distribution of the gas (the supercritical CO2 rich phase), and a larger volume of reservoir is needed in comparison to the pure CO2 injection scenario. In addition, the solubility trapping significantly increased in the presence of N2 and CH4.

L'évolution des techniques d'acquisition des imageries médicales et leur importance de plus en plus grande dans la prise en charge du patient (diagnostic, préparation d'intervention, suivi, etc.), font émerger de nouveaux besoins autour du traitement informatique des images. La reconnaissance du type de lésions hépatiques est un grand enjeu, notamment car le cancer du foie, létal et très répandu, est souvent diagnostiqué trop tard pour sauver le patient. C'est dans ce cadre qu'est né le projet de recherche de ce manuscrit, fruit d'une collaboration entre la société IMAIOS et le Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier (LIRMM).Cette thèse présente un système complet et automatique permettant, à partir d'images de lésions au format médical DICOM, d'extraire des descripteurs visuels de divers nodules hépatiques puis de les différencier à l'aide de ces derniers. Les contributions décrites s'articulent autour de divers axes : normalisation des niveaux de gris des images de lésions par rapport au foie sain, proposition, analyse et tests de descripteurs visuels (s'appuyant notamment sur les informations temporelles ou de densité des tissus), caractérisations diverses des différents types de lésions grâce à ces descripteurs et à un algorithme de classification. Les données sur lesquelles ces travaux ont été effectués sont des examens scanner multiphasiques. / Medical imaging acquisition has taken benefits from recent advances and is becoming more and more important in the patient care process. New needs raise, which are related to image processing. Hepatic lesion recognition is a hot topic, especially because liver cancer is wide-spread and leads to death, most of the time because of the diagnosis which is made too late. In this context is born this manuscrit research project, a collaboration between IMAIOS company and the Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics and Micro-electronics ofMontpellier (LIRMM).This thesis presents a complete and automated system that extracts visual features from lesion images in the medical format DICOM, then differenciate them on these features.The various described contributions are: intensity normalization using healthy liver values, analysis and experimentations around new visual features, which use temporal information or tissue density, different kind of caracterisation of the lesions. This work has been done on multi-phase Computed Tomography acquisitions.

Dans les avions et lanceurs, des systèmes entraînés par l’énergie hydraulique, mécanique ou pneumatique sont progressivement remplacés par des systèmes électriques pour des raisons techniques et industrielles. Cependant, ces nouveaux systèmes doivent répondre aux contraintes économiques et de poids concernant ces domaines tout en garantissant une certaine fiabilité. Dans ce contexte industriel, des topologies innovantes multi-machines multi-convertisseurs à haut niveau de fiabilité sont comparées ici à des structures plus standards toujours tolérantes aux défaillances. Ainsi, des topologies avec des machines polyphasées couplées électriquement en série ont été choisies pour ce travail de thèse. La mise en série permet la mutualisation des bras d’onduleurs, réduisant ainsi leur nombre, et augmente la résistance totale du système. La valeur crête du courant est alors réduite lors de l’apparition de certains défauts avec, comme contrepartie, une augmentation inéluctables des pertes Joule globales. Pour que le contrôle de ces machines couplées électriquement en série soit indépendant, il est mis en évidence pourquoi le nombre de phase de ces machines doit être supérieur à 3 et avec de plus une connexion électrique spéciale permutant les phases. Une nouvelle topologie brevetée est tout particulièrement étudiée et testée expérimentalement. Apres validation du concept, des stratégies de contrôle plus complexes et des reconfigurations de la commande après le défaut sont appliquées afin de juger des potentialités d’amélioration des systèmes Pour les comparaisons, des simulations et des essais expérimentaux ont été réalisés. Les critères choisis pour cette comparaison ont été la puissance de dimensionnement de l’onduleur, servant d’image de son coût et de son poids, les pertes Joule et le couple pulsatoire, tous les trois pour un fonctionnement en mode dégradé. / In airplanes and launch vehicles, hydraulics, mechanical and pneumatic systems are progressively being replaced by electric systems for technical and industrial reasons. However, these new electric systems have to take into account the economical and weight reliability constraints of the aeronautics industry, ensuring the required reliability. Therefore, novel high reliability multi-machine and multi-converter topologies are compared to standard structures looking forward to find solutions that can be industrially implemented. Then, series-coupled machine topologies were chosen for this work. The series-coupling mutualizes the inverter legs, reducing their number, and increases the total electrical resistance of the system. As a consequence, the peak-current after the occurrence of certain faults is reduced, but the total copper losses are higher. In order to independently control the series-coupled machines, it is highlighted the reason why the number of phases must be higher than 3 and with a special electric coupling that permutes the machine’s phases. A new patented topology is deeply analyzed with experimental tests. After a validation of the studied system, more complex control strategies and control reconfiguration after a fault are also implemented in order to evaluate the potential improvements on the system performance in degraded mode. Simulation and experimental results were used on this study. For this analysis the dimensioning power of the inverter, the copper losses and the torque ripple, all of them in degraded mode, are the compared criterions.

This thesis is concerned with the development of numerical techniques to simulate compressible multi-phase flows, in particular a high-accuracy numerical approach with mesh adaptivity. The Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method was chosen as the framework for this work for being characterized for its high-order of accuracy -thus low numerical diffusion- and being compatible with mesh adaptivity due to its locality. A DG solver named DiGGIT (Discontinuous Galerkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology) has been developed and several aspects of the method have been studied. The Local Discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method -an extension of DG for equations with high-order derivatives- was extended to solve multiphase flows using Diffused Interface Methods (DIM). This multi-phase model includes the convection of the volume fraction, which is treated as a Hamilton-Jacobi equation. This is the first study, to the author's knowledge, in which the volume fraction of a DIM is solved using the DG and the LDG methods. The formulation is independent of the Equation of State (EOS) and it can differ for each phase. This allows for a more accurate representation of the different fluids by using cubic EOSs, like the Peng-Robinson and the van der Waals models. Surface tension is modeled with a new numerical technique appropriate for LDG. Spurious oscillations due to surface tension are common to all the capturing schemes, and this new approach presents oscillations comparable in magnitude to the most common schemes. The moment limiter (ML) was generalized for non-uniform grids with hanging nodes that result from adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). The effect of characteristic, primitive, or conservative decomposition in the limiting stage was studied. The characteristic option cannot be used with the ML in multi-dimensions. In general, primitive variable decomposition is a better option than with conservative variables, particularly for multiphase flows, since the former type of decomposition reduces the numerical oscillations at material discontinuities. An additional limiting technique was introduced for DIM to preserve positivity while minimizing the numerical diffusion, which is especially important at the interface. The accuracy-preserving total variation diminishing (AP-TVD) marker for ``troubled-cell' detection, which uses an averaged-derivative basis, was modified to use the Legendre polynomial basis. Given that the latest basis is generally used for DG, the new approach avoids transforming to the averaged-derivative basis, what results in a more efficient technique. Furthermore, a new error estimator was proposed to determine where to refine or coarsen the grid. This estimator was compared against other estimator used in the literature and it showed an improved performance. In order to provide equal order of accuracy in time as in space, the commonly used 3rd-order TVD Runge-Kutta (RK) scheme in the DG method was replaced in some cases by the Spectral Deferred Correction (SDC) technique. High orders in time were shown to only be required when the error in time is significant. For instance, convection-dominated compressible flows require for stability a time step much smaller than is required for accuracy, so in such cases 3rd-order TVD RK resulted to be more efficient than SDC with higher orders. All these new capabilities were included in DiGGIT and have provided a generalized approach capable of solving sub- and super-critical flows at sub- and super-sonic speeds, using a high-order scheme in space and time, and with AMR. Canonical test cases are presented to verify and validate the formulation in one, two, and three dimensions. Finally, the solver is applied to practical applications. Shock-bubble interaction is studied and the effect of the different thermodynamic closures is assessed. Interaction between single-drops and a wall is simulated. Sticking and the onset of splashing are observed. In addition, the solver is used to simulate turbulent flows, where the high-order of accuracy clearly shows its benefits. Finally, the methodology is challenged with the simulation of a liquid jet in cross flow.

A parallel GPU compatible Lagrangian mesh free particle solver for multiphase fluid flow based on SPH scheme is developed and used to capture the interface evolution during droplet impact. Surface tension is modeled employing the multiphase scheme of Hu et al. (2006). In order to precisely simulate the wetting phenomena, a method based on the work of Šikalo et al. (2005) is jointly used with the model proposed by Afkhami et al. (2009) to ensure accurate dynamic contact angle calculations. Accurate predictions were obtained for droplet contact angle during spreading. A two-dimensional analytical model is developed as an expansion to the work of Chandra et al. (1991). Results obtain from the solver agrees well to this analytical results. Effects of memory management techniques along with a variety of task assigning algorithms on GPU are studied. GPU speedups of up to 120 times faster than a single processor CPU were obtained.

A parallel GPU compatible Lagrangian mesh free particle solver for multiphase fluid flow based on SPH scheme is developed and used to capture the interface evolution during droplet impact. Surface tension is modeled employing the multiphase scheme of Hu et al. (2006). In order to precisely simulate the wetting phenomena, a method based on the work of Šikalo et al. (2005) is jointly used with the model proposed by Afkhami et al. (2009) to ensure accurate dynamic contact angle calculations. Accurate predictions were obtained for droplet contact angle during spreading. A two-dimensional analytical model is developed as an expansion to the work of Chandra et al. (1991). Results obtain from the solver agrees well to this analytical results. Effects of memory management techniques along with a variety of task assigning algorithms on GPU are studied. GPU speedups of up to 120 times faster than a single processor CPU were obtained.