Artigos de Revista

No artigo desenvolvem-se, em primeiro lugar, aspetos relativos às temáticas mais gerais da relação entre a habitação e os modos de vida, do interesse no desenvolvimento de diversas soluções domésticas e de vizinhança, da oportunidade de se avançar numa estratégia de adaptabilidade habitacional e da importância de se privilegiar uma habitação apropriável e agradavelmente mutante. Sequencialmente avança-se em aspetos mais específicos da adaptabilidade habitacional, designadamente, por junção e subdivisão de compartimentos e por uma forte relaç\ao de adequação aos modos de vida específicos dos seus habitantes.

Today, there are several computational models to predict the mechanical behaviour of masonry structures subjected to external loading. Such models require the input of material parameters to describe the mechanical behaviour and strength of masonry constructions. Although such masonry materialparameters are characterised by stochastic

Typically, large-scale irrigation systems are built almost entirely in a short time-frame, a significant part of the assets age at the same time and concentrated investment needs for rehabilitation are predictable. This paper focuses on planning these needs in an aggregated way, providing a big picture for the long term investment plan. A methodology for this purpose was developed and applied to a large-scale irrigation utility in Portugal.

In recent years the study of renderings within conservation practice has acquired major technical and methodological advances. Due to the need of compatibility, usually repair mortars must be based on lime, and standardized tests are sometimes ineffective for these compatible substitution materials, which are often low strength mortars. The influence of the aggregates' characteristics on several factors that affect the adhesive strength of lime-based mortars is assessed and a new non-standard test method to determine the tensile bond strength of low strength mortars to porous substrates is presented and validated. The outcome shows that the new methodology offers the advantages of precision of the test device, ease of application and mostly consistency of the results. Furthermore, the main data show close relationship between the tensile bond strength and the pore size distribution of the mortars, which is very sensitive to the aggregates’ characteristics: In general, increasing the mortars pore volume of coarse pores (above the critical pore diameter of the substrate) strengthens the effective bond between these elements. Moreover, the compositional similarity between the aggregates and the substrate could also favour the bond between these elements.

Nonhomogeneous material characteristics of masonry lead to complex fracture mechanisms,which require substantial analysis regarding the influence of masonry constituents. In this context, thisstudy presents a discontinuum modeling strategy, based on the discrete element method, developed toinvestigate the tensile fracture mechanism of masonry wallettes parallel to the bed joints consideringthe inherent variation in the material properties. The applied numerical approach utilizes polyhedralblocks to represent masonry and integrate the equations of motion explicitly to compute nodalvelocities for each block in the system. The mechanical interaction between the adjacent blocks iscomputed at the active contact points, where the contact stresses are calculated and updated basedon the implemented contact constitutive models. In this research, di erent fracture mechanisms ofmasonry wallettes under tension are explored developing at the unit

Urban waters represent a crucial component for the enhancement of urban resilience due to their importance in cities. Nature-based solutions (NBS) have emerged as sustainable solutions to contribute to urban resilience in order to meet the challenges of climate change. In order to promote the use of NBS for increasing urban resilience, tools that demonstrate the value of this type of solutions over the long-term are required. A performance assessment system provides an adequate basis for demonstrating this value, as well as for diagnosing the current city situation, selecting and monitoring the implementation of solutions.

Urban water systems (UWSs) are energy-intensive worldwide, particularly for drinking-water pumping and aeration in wastewater treatment. Usual approaches to improve energy efficiency focus only on equipment and disregard the UWS as a continuum of stages from source-to-tap-to-source (abstraction/transport

HIDRALERTA is a forecast and early warning system for coastal and port regions capable of predicting emergency situations, as well as carrying out risk assessment. The system concentrates on evaluating wave overtopping and flooding scenarios. It uses offshore sea-wave and wind forecast data, as well as tide data, as input to determine wave overtopping at specific locations. The calculation of the mean overtopping discharge over a structure is made through artificial neural network (ANN) tools and/or empirical formulae, which are able to define the spatial distribution of the flow behind the structure.The HIDRALERTA system is composed of four modules developed in Open Source Web Technology, mainly using the Python Language. The Warning System can be configured and adapted for specific scenarios. The system has been successfully tested for the Port and Bay of Praia da Vitória, Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal, and is now under development and being implemented at the ports of Madalena do Pico and S. Roque do Pico.This paper describes the work carried out to date on the system and its application to these two ports in the Pico Island, Azores.

During the last decade, many vibration-based structural health monitoring systems have been successfully implementedin different structures such as bridges, towers, stadia and wind turbines, with the aim of studying thestructure dynamics and its evolution over time, eventually detecting the occurrence of novel structural behaviourthat may indicate the presence of damage.Such vibration-based monitoring systems generally rely on the identification of modal properties, which arethen used as monitoring features. Therefore, from operational modal analysis to the tracking of those featuresand finally to data normalization, many processing steps occur that depend on the accuracy of the identifiedmodal properties. Thus, the estimation of the uncertainties associated with the identified modal properties increasesthe robustness of this process.In this context, data obtained from the continuous dynamic monitoring of a concrete arch dam has been usedto evaluate the gains of quantifying the uncertainties of modal properties, evaluating in particular the effect oftaking these uncertainties into consideration when performing automated operational modal analysis, modaltracking and data normalization. Nevertheless, it is observed that the most significant gains of consideringestimates uncertainties occur when these quantities are used for removing outliers during modal tracking.

During the last decade, many vibration-based structural health monitoring systems have been successfully implemented in different structures such as bridges, towers, stadia and wind turbines, with the aim of studying the structure dynamics and its evolution over time, eventually detecting the occurrence of novel structural behaviour that may indicate the presence of damage.Such vibration-based monitoring systems generally rely on the identification of modal properties, which are then used as monitoring features. Therefore, from operational modal analysis to the tracking of those features and finally to data normalization, many processing steps occur that depend on the accuracy of the identified modal properties. Thus, the estimation of the uncertainties associated with the identified modal properties increases the robustness of this process.In this context, data obtained from the continuous dynamic monitoring of a concrete arch dam has been used to evaluate the gains of quantifying the uncertainties of modal properties, evaluating in particular the effect of taking these uncertainties into consideration when performing automated operational modal analysis, modal tracking and data normalization. Nevertheless, it is observed that the most significant gains of considering estimates uncertainties occur when these quantities are used for removing outliers during modal tracking.