Este trabalho descreve os métodos e os resultados encontrados a partir da implementação de métodos estáticos para análise da estabilidade de tensão em sistemas elétricos de potência. A determinação da margem de estabilidade de tensão foi feita através do cálculo do menor valor singular da matriz jacobiana associada às equações de fluxo de carga, comumente utilizado como índice estático de colapso de tensão. As não linearidades e descontinuidades relatadas nas referências estudadas e encontradas nos testes realizados, levaram-nos a propor o uso da razão entre o menor e o maior valores singulares da mesma matriz jacobiana, na expectativa de que este índice tivesse um comportamento menos instável do que o menor valor singular, o que não foi confirmado nos testes realizados. Identifica-se também as regiões do sistema elétrico mais afetadas pela instabilidade, o que é feito através da determinação da barra crítica do sistema e da classificação das barras de carga em ilhas de controle de tensão. A barra crítica é identificada através do cálculo do vetor tangente do sistema, conforme proposto nas referências citadas no trabalho. Como alternativa ao vetor tangente para a identificação da barra crítica, propôs-se usar o vetor singular à direita associado ao menor valor singular da matriz jacobiana. A comparação da capacidade de identificação da barra crítica por esses dois vetores mostrou uma clara vantagem do uso do vetor tangente. A rotina para identificação das ilhas de controle de tensão foi adaptada a partir de um método desenvolvido para a análise de coerência em barras de carga, e os resultados encontrados foram bastante satisfatórios. Os métodos implementados foram testados em diversas situações, com o objetivo de se analisar os efeitos dos modelos de carga ZIP com elevadas parcelas de impedância constante, dos limitadores de potência reativa dos geradores e da repartição do incremento da carga de potência ativa entre os geradores. / This work describes the methods and results got from the implementation of static methods for power systems voltage stability analisys. The power system voltage stability margin was predicted by the smallest load flow jacobian\'s singular value, commonly used as a prediction index to voltage stability. lt is investigated the use of ratio of the smallest single value by the biggest one as voltage colapse index, assuming that it\'s less unstable than the singular value itself, specialy near the collapse point. The results presented shown a clear advantage of using the smallest singular value instead of this singular value rate. The identification of the system\'s regions affected by the voltage drop is made by the tangent vector and by the voltage island identification method proposed on this work. Is compared the ability to identify system\'s critical bus by the tangent vector and right singular vetor of the smallest jacobian\'s singular value. In this case, tests results show the superiority of tangent vector. All the simulations presented are compared to allow the analysis of the voltage dependents load models (with high percentual of constant impedances), reactive limiters and generators load sharing efects over the smallest singular value, the rate of the smallest single value by the biggest one, voltage island classification and the critical bus identification.

Cette thèse se présente comme une traversée de ma pratique artistique. A travers l’étude de divers objets hétéroclites, comme les arbres et le bois, les miroirs et le verre, des « choses » qui pour des raisons contingentes sont apparues au cours de mes expériences comme des su-jets dignes d’intérêt, elle se propose de mettre en évidence une manière de penser les objets dans leur singularité. J’essaye de faire échoir la vision familière que nous portons sur eux, pour montrer une « histoire blanche ». C’est par exemple : Fissurer la surface pour montrer la matière, continuer à creuser pour constituer une faille dans nos systèmes de représenta-tions, c’est créer des travaux où ce que nous voyons et percevons ouvre sur ce que nous ne pouvons voir et percevoir. C’est trouver les procédés plastiques qui puissent montrer les in-connus de ces matériaux et phénomènes, c’est chercher des moyens poétiques pour faire émerger la puissance de ces objets uniques. Pour ce faire, cette thèse s’est construite par des allers-retours incessants entre pratique et théorie, trouvant son inspiration dans l’analyse de techniques industrielles et artisanales de confection d’objets : sylviculture, scierie, menuiserie, miroiterie. Elle s’est également consti-tuée par la comparaison de travaux et réflexions d’artistes de la seconde partie du XXe siècle, comme Giuseppe Penone pour les arbres et le bois, et Roberts Smithson pour les miroirs et le verre. Enfin, elle articule mes travaux avec la notion d’Index, développée par le philosophe Charles Sanders Peirce. / This doctoral thesis is a journey throughout my artistic practice. It will be driven by the study of dissimilar objects, such as a tree or wood ; a mirror or glass. These « objects » emer-ged spontaneously during my experiments and proved themselves worthy of interest. From this, I will carry out a new mindset on « objects », focusing especially on their singularity. I will attempt to overturn the familiar vision we normally exert on them, to exhibit a «white history ». This may occur, for instance, by breaking the surface, exposing the material or by delving deeper into it. These kinds of gestures establish a breach in the usual idioms of re-presentation. It creates a showcase where what we see and get opens also on what we cannot see and cannot get. All this leads to the importance of finding the Artistic processes capable of showing the unbeknownst of these materials and phenomenon to us. It all comes back to the research of a poetic sense that makes the puissance emerge from these unique objects. For this purpose, the thesis’s construction will move back and forth between Praxis and theory. Its inspiration in found in the analysis of industrial and craftsmanship techniques as much as in the fabricating of objects ; sylviculture, saw milling, carpentry and mirror manu-facture. Once again we shall alternate in between the works and reflections of artists of the second half of the 20th century, such as Giuseppe Penone for trees and wood, and Roberts Smithson for mirrors and glass. Finally, the thesis articulates my personal work by use of the Index notion, brought out by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Nilpotent Hessenberg varieties are a family of subvarieties of the flag variety, which include the Springer varieties, the Peterson variety, and the whole flag variety. In this thesis I give a geometric proof that the cohomology of the flag variety surjects onto the cohomology of the Peterson variety; I provide a combinatorial criterion for determing the singular loci of a large family of regular nilpotent Hessenberg varieties; and I describe the equivariant cohomology of any regular nilpotent Hessenberg variety whose cohomology is generated by its degree two classes.

This dissertation describes experiments on drop dynamics. It is split into two main parts: The first investigates the breakup of liquid during the impact of a drop on a pool surface, with focus on the smallest and fastest splashed satellite droplets. The second part studies the much slower coalescence of two minute water droplets in oil inside a micro-channel, with applications to separation of water droplets from crude oil emulsions. First, we study drop-on-liquid impacts in high-speed experiments with extreme time and spatial resolutions using up to 5 million frames-per-second video imaging. This is used to identify and explain two primary mechanisms which produce the smallest and fastest splashed secondary droplets, i.e. ejecta sheets and singular jets. Using a novel 25-m-tall vacuum tube we generate very large impact velocities, to reach regimes in parameter-space never studied before. During the earliest stage of the impact a fast-moving horizontal ejecta sheet emerges from the neck between drop and pool. The breakup of this sheet forms a myriad of micron-size droplets. The ejecta bending is dominated by air resistance, which we investigate under reduced ambient pressures and successfully model based on Bernoulli suction which pulls down the ejecta to hit the pool surface. The ejecta can initially bend up or down depending on the relative viscosities of the drop and pool, bending up if the pool is less viscous. Singular jets are produced by the collapse of drop-impact craters for deep pools, when a dimple forms at the bottom of the crater focusing the energy into a micron-sized region, with jetting velocities over 100 m/s. We use Gerris to study the fine details, obscured in the experiments. In the second part, we study the coalescence of water droplets inside an oil emulsion, developing an empirical relation between the coalescence interaction time tc and the modified shear-rate. This is done by tracking 3-D drop trajectories inside a microchannel, with two perpendicular high-speed cameras. For droplets in crude oil, we implement near-infrared visualization in an innovative device to quantify demulsifier efficiency, using mono-disperse micro-droplets.

This thesis presents a novel singular-value-based semi-fragile watermarking scheme for image content authentication with tampering localization. The proposed scheme first generates a secured watermark bit sequence by performing a logical "xor" operation on a content-based watermark and content-independent watermark, wherein the content-based watermark is generated by a singular-value-based watermark bit sequence that represents intrinsic algebraic image properties, and the content-independent watermark is generated by a private-key-based random watermark bit sequence. It next embeds the secure watermark in the approximation subband of each non-overlapping 4×4 block using the adaptive quantization method to generate the watermarked image. The image content authentication process starts with regenerating the secured watermark bit sequence following the same process mentioned in the secured watermark bit sequence generation. It then extracts a possibly embedded watermark using the parity of the quantization results from the probe image. Next, the authentication process constructs a binary error map, whose height and width are a quarter of those of the original image, using the absolute difference between the regenerated secured watermark and the extracted watermark. It finally computes two authentication measures (i.e., M1 and M2), with M1 measuring the overall similarity between the regenerated watermark and the extracted watermark, and M2 measuring the overall clustering level of the tampered error pixels. These two authentication measures are further seamlessly integrated in the authentication process to confirm the image content and localize any possible tampered areas. The extensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms four peer schemes and is capable of identifying intentional tampering, incidental modification, and localizing tampered regions.

Multiway data are becoming more and more common. While there are many approaches to extending principal component analysis (PCA) from usual data matrices to multiway arrays, their conceptual differences from the usual PCA, and the methodological implications of such differences remain largely unknown. This thesis aims to specifically address these questions. In particular, we clarify the subtle difference between PCA and singular value decomposition (SVD) for multiway data, and show that multiway principal components (PCs) can be estimated reliably in absence of the eigengaps required by the usual PCA, and in general much more efficiently than the usual PCs. Furthermore, the sample multiway PCs are asymptotically independent and hence allow for separate and more accurate inferences about the population PCs. The practical merits of multiway PCA are further demonstrated through numerical, both simulated and real data, examples.

The interfacial heat transfer coefficient is an important variable regarding the subject of metal castings. The error associated with the experimental temperature data must be dealt with appropriately so that they do not significantly affect the resulting interfacial heat transfer coefficient. The systematic and random errors are addressed using a combination of three-dimensional finite element modeling and the matrix transform method, respectively. Experimentally obtained A356 permanent mold casting data was used to estimate the interfacial heat transfer coefficient corresponding to common industrial mold coatings.

No description available.

This thesis continues the work started with my previous supervisor, Dr. Shaohua Chen. In [15], the authors developed some tools that showed the boundedness or blowup of solutions to a semilinear parabolic system with homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. This system, the so called ’Activator-Inhibitor Model’, is of interest as it is used to model biological processes and pattern formation. Similar tools were later adapted to deal with the same parabolic system in [3], in which the authors prove global boundedness of solutions under homogeneous Dirichlet conditions. This new problem is of mathematical interest as the solutions may grow singular near the boundary. Shortly after, a different system was considered in [4], where the authors proved global boundedness of solutions to a system featuring similar singular reaction terms. The goal of this thesis is twofold: first, the tools developed that allow us to tackle these sorts of problems will be demonstrated in detail to showcase its utility; the second is to then use these tools to generalize some of these previous results to a larger class of singular parabolic systems. In doing so, we expand the classical literature found in [14] and other notable works, where nonsingular equations are extensively treated. The motivation for the first should be clear. While there are numerous bodies of text treating nonsingular problems, there are no collections available dealing with these types of singularities exclusively. This is of practical use to other mathematicians studying partial differential equations. The motivation for the second is, perhaps, more practical. There are a growing number of models found in physics, chemistry and biology that may be generalized to a singular type system. Through allowing those individuals to treat these problems, we may gain valuable insights into the real world and how these processes behave. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Electronic textiles provide an effective platform to contain wearable computing elements, especially components geared towards the application of activity recognition. An activity recogni tion system built into a wearable textile substrate can be utilized in a variety of areas including health monitoring, military applications, entertainment, and fashion. Many of the activity recognition and motion capture systems previously developed have several drawbacks and limitations with regard to their respective designs and implementations. Some such systems are often times expensive, not conducive to mass production, and may be difficult to calibrate. An effective system must also be scalable and should be deployable in a variety of environments and contexts. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a self-contained motion sensing wearable electronic textile system with an emphasis toward the application of activity recognition. The system is developed with scalability and deployability in mind, and as such, utilizes a two-tier hierarchical model combined with a network infrastructure and wireless connectivity. An example prototype system, in the form of a jumpsuit garment, is presented and is constructed from relatively inexpensive components and materials. / Master of Science