Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

A mesh-less method for solving incompressible, multi-phase flow problems has been developed and is discussed along with the presentation of benchmark results showing good agreement with theoretical and experimental results. Results of a systematic, parametric study of the single phase flow around a 2D circular cylinder at Reynolds numbers up to 1000 are presented and discussed. Simulation results show good agreement with experimental results. Extension of the method to deal with multiphase flow including liquid-to-vapor phase transition along with applications to cavitating flow are discussed. Insight gleaned from numerical experiments of the cavity closure problem are discussed along with recommendations for additional research. Several conclusions regarding the use of the method are made.

A presente dissertação teve como finalidade avaliar a precisão e a discrepância das coordenadas (acurácia) obtidas por meio das observações GPS, no modo estático rápido, medidas com receptores de uma freqüência, empregando-se a técnica de suavização do código C/A pela fase da portadora para diferentes comprimentos de linha base (20, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200 e 300 Km), a partir da estação de monitoramento contínuo da EESC/USP. Essa técnica obteve boa repercussão no Brasil, a partir do momento em que foi permitida sua utilização para fins de georreferenciamento de imóveis rurais, conforme a norma técnica do INCRA, que permite a utilização da suavização do código pela fase da portadora, desde que esta apresente acurácia com valores iguais ou inferiores a 50 cm. Atualmente, trabalhos com tal técnica estão sendo desenvolvidos e aceitos para compor o banco de dados do cadastro rural nacional. Pelos resultados obtidos nesta dissertação, foi possível avaliar que a aplicação dessa técnica não atende à exigência requerida em 100% das medições e, ao mesmo tempo, verificar a diferença entre a precisão do pós-processamento, indicada pelos softwares comerciais e a acurácia dos pontos medidos comparados com os pontos de controle estabelecidos para esse fim. / The present dissertation has as objective to evaluate precision and discrepancies of coordinates (accuracy) obtained through GPS observations, in a rapid static method, measured by single frequency, which applies carrier-smoothed-code for different baseline length (20, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200 and 300 km), since continuous monitoring station from EESC/USP. This technique obtained a good repercussion in Brazil, since when its use was legitimate in rural property georeferencing, according to INCRA\'s norma técnica (technical rule), which allows the use of carrier-smoothed-code in view of the fact that presents accuracy with equal or inferior values to 50 cm. Currently, works using such technique are developed and accepted in order to compound database of national rural survey in Brazil. Based on the obtained results it was possible to evaluate that the technique does not guaranteed to requested requirement in 100% of measurements, and at the same time to verify the difference between post-processing precision, indicated by commercial software, as well as measured point accuracy compared with points established for this purposed.

The ultimate goal of this research is to develop the capability of direct numerical simulation of a flow containing numerous rigid finite size particles. In order to reach this goal, we have implemented the smoothed profile method (SPM) in the University of Iowa in-house solver, pELAFINT3D and overcame several challenges related to the method. This includes a proposed formulation for the interface thickness and many validations and comparisons with experimental data as well as with a second-order accurate sharp interface method. As one of the issues related to low-density particles is the instability, SPM has been improved by developing to a fully implicit scheme. Moreover, use of higher order integration formulation and implementation of Euler parameters have been shown to be helpful in stabilization of the calculations. To preserve the efficiency when the number of the particles increases, local mesh refinement is shown to be a very effective tool. A revised version of SPM that has only one projection step is proposed to improve the efficiency of the method. A comprehensive efficiency study is performed and it has been shown that the new method is less expensive in problems with high added mass effect when strongly coupled fluid-structure interaction schemes are used. Moreover, the code is massively parallelized using MPI and PETSc libraries. The parallelization includes I/O, operations leading to construction of the linear solver as well as the solver itself. Simulation of a particle laden flow involves particles collisions. Two novel collision models are suggested which are able to avoid particle overlapping for arbitrary shape particles. The methods are efficient as they are not involved with extra grid refinement related to implementing lubrication forces. The issue of handling continuously changing number of particles in a particle laden flow is solved by implementation of a linked list data structure for the particles. By studying a flow over a constricted region we showed that the platelets’ activation is more likely to happen for the particles that pass from the middle of the upper bump region because those particles will have longer exposure time to the high shear flow behind the bump. PDF contour of particles’ presence show the more concentrated presence of the particles near the bump. Moreover, the interaction of RBCs and platelets pushes the platelets toward the wall after the bottom wall.

In this thesis, a new approach is developed, avoiding the correspondence problem caused by the difference in embodiment between imitator and demonstrator in imitation learning. In our work, the imitator is a fluidic system of dynamics totally different than the imitatee, which is a human performing hand gestures and human body postures. The fluidic system is composed of fluid particles, which are used for the discretization of the problem domain. In this work, we demonstrate the fluidics formation control so as to imitate by observation initially given human body poses and hand gestures. Our fluidic formation control is based on setting suitable parameters of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), which is a particle based Lagrangian method, according to imitation learning. In the controller part, we developed three approaches: In the first one, we used Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for training of the input-output pairs on the fluidic imitation system. We extracted shape based feature vectors for human hand gestures as inputs of the system and for output we took the fluid dynamics parameters. In the second approach, we employed the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method for human hand gesture and human body pose classification and imitation. Lastly, we developed a region based controller which assigns the fluid parameters according to the human body poses and hand gestures. In this controller, our algorithm determines the best fitting ellipses on human body regions and human hand finger positions and maps ellipse parameters to the fluid parameters. The fluid parameters adjusted by the fluidics imitation controller are body force (f), density, stiffness coefficient and velocity of particles (V) so as to lead formations of fluidic swarms to human body poses and hand gestures.

In this dissertation, we investigate jackknife empirical likelihood methods motivated by recent statistics research and other related fields. Computational intensity of empirical likelihood can be significantly reduced by using jackknife empirical likelihood methods without losing computational accuracy and stability. We demonstrate that proposed jackknife empirical likelihood methods are able to handle several challenging and open problems in terms of elegant asymptotic properties and accurate simulation result in finite samples. These interesting problems include ROC curves with missing data, the difference of two ROC curves in two dimensional correlated data, a novel inference for the partial AUC and the difference of two quantiles with one or two samples. In addition, empirical likelihood methodology can be successfully applied to the linear transformation model using adjusted estimation equations. The comprehensive simulation studies on coverage probabilities and average lengths for those topics demonstrate the proposed jackknife empirical likelihood methods have a good performance in finite samples under various settings. Moreover, some related and attractive real problems are studied to support our conclusions. In the end, we provide an extensive discussion about some interesting and feasible ideas based on our jackknife EL procedures for future studies.

This thesis proposes a framework for controlling mobile robot networks based on a fluid dynamics paradigm. The approach is inspired by natural behaviors of fluids demonstrating desirable characteristics for collective robots. The underlying mathematical formalism is developed through establishing analogies between fluid bodies and multi-robot systems such that robots are modeled as fluid elements that constitute a fluid body. The governing equations of fluid dynamics are adapted to multi-robot systems and applied on control of robots. The model governs flow of a robot based on its local interactions with neighboring robots and surrounding environment. Therefore, it provides a layer of decentralized reactive control on low level behaviors, such as obstacle avoidance, deployment, and flow. These behaviors are inherent to the nature of fluids and provide emergent coordination among robots. The framework also introduces a high-level control layer that can be designed according to requirements of the particular task. Emergence of cooperation and collective behavior can be controlled in this layer via a set of parameters obtained from the mathematical description of the system in the lower layer. Validity and potential of the approach have been experimented through simulations primarily on two common collective robotic tasks / deployment and navigation. It is shown that gas-like mobile sensor networks can provide effective coverage in unknown, unstructured, and dynamically changing environments through self-spreading. On the other hand, robots can also demonstrate directional flow in navigation or path following tasks, showing that a wide range of multi-robot applications can potentially be developed using the framework.

University, Diss., 2004--Saarbrücken.

This thesis presents a two-phase liquid-solid numerical model using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). The scheme is developed for multi-phase flows in industrial tanks containing sediment used in the nuclear industry for decommissioning. These two-phase liquid-sediments flows feature a changing interfacial profile, large deformations and fragmentation of the interface with internal jets generating resuspension of the solid phase. SPH is a meshless Lagrangian discretization scheme whose major advantage is the absence of a mesh making the method ideal for interfacial and highly non-linear flows with fragmentation and resuspension. Emphasis has been given to the yield profile and rheological characteristics of the sediment solid phase using a yielding, shear and suspension layer which is needed to predict accurately the erosion phenomena. The numerical SPH scheme is based on the explicit treatment of both phases using Newtonian and non-Newtonian Bingham-type constitutive models. This is supplemented by a yield criterion to predict the onset of yielding of the sediment surface and a suspension model at low volumetric concentrations of sediment solid. The multi-phase model has been compared with experimental and 2-D reference numerical models for scour following a dry-bed dam break yielding satisfactory results and improvements over well-known SPH multi-phase models. A 3-D case using more than 4 million particles, that is to the author’s best knowledge one of the largest liquid-sediment SPH simulations, is presented for the first time. The numerical model is accelerated with the use of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), with massively parallel capabilities. With the adoption of a multi-phase model the computational requirements increase due to extra arithmetic operations required to resolve both phases and the additional memory requirements for storing a second phase in the device memory. The open source weakly compressible SPH solver DualSPHysics was chosen as the platform for both CPU and GPU implementations. The implementation and optimisation of the multi-phase GPU code achieved a speed up of over 50 compared to a single thread serial code. Prior to this thesis, large resolution liquid-solid simulations were prohibitive and 3-D simulations with millions of particles were unfeasible unless variable particle resolution was employed. Finally, the thesis addresses the challenging problem of enforcing wall boundary conditions in SPH with a novel extension of an existing Modified Virtual Boundary Particle (MVBP) technique. In contrast to the MVBP method, the extended MVBP (eMVBP) boundary condition guarantees that arbitrarily complex domains can be readily discretized ensuring approximate zeroth and first order consistency for all particles whose smoothing kernel support overlaps the boundary. The 2-D eMVBP method has also been extended to 3-D using boundary surfaces discretized into sets of triangular planes to represent the solid wall. Boundary particles are then obtained by translating a full uniform stencil according to the fluid particle position and applying an efficient ray casting algorithm to select particles inside the fluid domain. No special treatment for corners and low computational cost make the method ideal for GPU parallelization. The models are validated for a number of 2-D and 3-D cases, where significantly improved behaviour is obtained in comparison with the conventional boundary techniques. Finally the capability of the numerical scheme to simulate a dam break simulation is also shown in 2-D and 3-D.

A presente dissertação teve como finalidade avaliar a precisão e a discrepância das coordenadas (acurácia) obtidas por meio das observações GPS, no modo estático rápido, medidas com receptores de uma freqüência, empregando-se a técnica de suavização do código C/A pela fase da portadora para diferentes comprimentos de linha base (20, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200 e 300 Km), a partir da estação de monitoramento contínuo da EESC/USP. Essa técnica obteve boa repercussão no Brasil, a partir do momento em que foi permitida sua utilização para fins de georreferenciamento de imóveis rurais, conforme a norma técnica do INCRA, que permite a utilização da suavização do código pela fase da portadora, desde que esta apresente acurácia com valores iguais ou inferiores a 50 cm. Atualmente, trabalhos com tal técnica estão sendo desenvolvidos e aceitos para compor o banco de dados do cadastro rural nacional. Pelos resultados obtidos nesta dissertação, foi possível avaliar que a aplicação dessa técnica não atende à exigência requerida em 100% das medições e, ao mesmo tempo, verificar a diferença entre a precisão do pós-processamento, indicada pelos softwares comerciais e a acurácia dos pontos medidos comparados com os pontos de controle estabelecidos para esse fim. / The present dissertation has as objective to evaluate precision and discrepancies of coordinates (accuracy) obtained through GPS observations, in a rapid static method, measured by single frequency, which applies carrier-smoothed-code for different baseline length (20, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200 and 300 km), since continuous monitoring station from EESC/USP. This technique obtained a good repercussion in Brazil, since when its use was legitimate in rural property georeferencing, according to INCRA\'s norma técnica (technical rule), which allows the use of carrier-smoothed-code in view of the fact that presents accuracy with equal or inferior values to 50 cm. Currently, works using such technique are developed and accepted in order to compound database of national rural survey in Brazil. Based on the obtained results it was possible to evaluate that the technique does not guaranteed to requested requirement in 100% of measurements, and at the same time to verify the difference between post-processing precision, indicated by commercial software, as well as measured point accuracy compared with points established for this purposed.