Capítulos de livros

Activated carbons are versatile adsorbents that can play a crucial role in the enhancement of wastewater treatment, namely by controlling organic microcontaminants of emerging concern (CECs) and organic matter. These materials have a 100-year market availability, large scientific testing at lab-scale and applicability in consolidated technologies. However, the use of activated carbons at full-scale wastewater treatment is still emerging, driven by the increasing awareness on environmental and human threats mainly resulting from CECs. The present chapter reviews the literature on the application of activated carbons in full- or large pilot-scale plants, highlighting the state-of-art knowledge on practical issues on operational set-ups, improvements on water overall quality, and costs. The selection criteria and properties of the powdered and granular (PAC and GAC) materials used, and the pros and critical aspects of their application, relevant for product development and process optimisation, are also analysed and determine the research needs proposed for a technical, economic, and environmentally sustainable application of activated carbon in full-scale advanced wastewater treatment.

The prediction of scour evolution at bridge foundations is of utmost importance for engineering design and infrastructures’ safety. The complexity of the scouring inherent flow field is the result of separation and generation of multiple vortices and further magnified due to the dynamic interaction between the flow and the movable bed throughout the development of a scour hole. In experimental environments, the current approaches for scour characterization rely mainly on measurements of the evolution of movable beds rather than on flow field characterization. This paper investigates the turbulent flow field around oblong bridge pier models in a well-controlled laboratory environment, for understanding the mechanisms of flow responsible for current-induced scour. This study was based on an experimental campaign planned for velocity measurements of the flow around oblong bridge pier models, of different widths, carried out in a large-scale tilting flume. Measurements of stream-wise, cross-wise and vertical velocity distributions, as well as of the Reynolds shear stresses, were performed at both the flat and eroded bed stages of scouring development with a high-resolution acoustic velocimeter. The time-averaged values of velocity and shear stress are larger in the presence of a developed scour hole than in the corresponding flat bed configuration.

Urban areas are dynamic, complex, and vulnerable systems involving multiple strategic urban services, stakeholders, and citizens. Strategic services essential to society include water and sewerage (water supply, and wastewater and stormwater management), waste management, energy supply, public lighting, transport, and public security. The potential effects of climate dynamics on the urban areas might lead to the aggravation of existing fragile conditions and the emergence of new hazards or risk factors, with major impacts on strategic urban services, people, the natural and built environment, and the economy. Climate change challenges to urban areas thus require an integrated and sustainable approach to increase their resilience, with the allocation of the needed resources at all administrative levels. These include the development and implementation of disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies, policies, plans, laws, and regulations in all relevant sectors (UNISDR, 2015). This chapter describes a resilience assessment framework to be used by cities and urban-service managers. The framework considers a structured and objective-driven assessment aiming at supporting the development and monitoring of cities’ and urban services’ resilience action plans, thus contributing to appropriate DRR investments. We then apply this assessment framework to the waste and mobility sectors in Lisbon (Portugal), identifying main opportunities to enhance their resilience.

Urban water services make use of extensive networked infrastructures - water supply and drainage systems. Efficient management of these services relies on the quality of measurements of hydraulic variables in pipes and sewers to support robust analysis of systems’ performance, needed to many decision-making processes. The quality of measurements is key for the sustainability of urban water services, having a growing impact on decisions and on trade relations. Often, quantities of interest (e.g., flowrate, volume, level andv elocity), affecting net balances (e.g., inflow and outflow net balances, water losses, undue inflows and trade volumes) and used to support decision making, are obtained indirectly from a wide diversity of instrumentation, using different principles and methods. To reach acceptable accuracy, required for the measurement itself, and because of implications when used for management, three elements are critical: good measurement practices, traceability, and measurement uncertainty. Measurement uncertainty plays a relevant role today, to capture the random nature of measurement, and is considered the most reliable parameter able to provide information about the accuracy of measurement within a certain degree of confidence, allowing comparisons between instruments, practices, and methods. Advances in synergies of knowledge from Hydrology, Hydraulics, Metrology and Data Science are reported, as well as perspectives of future developments.

Railway tracks may be perceived as simple physical structures, but in fact they entail a significant level of complexity as refers to the assessment and prediction of their transient and long-term behaviors. These mostly result from the intrinsic characteristics of their components and of the dynamic interaction with the suc-cessive passing trains at different speeds and with different loading characteris-tics. The railway industry’s traditionally conservative approach to new technolo-gies and the limited access, mostly for safety reasons, to related infrastructures somewhat hinder new developments and make it difficult to obtain further insight into the behavior of these structures. To overcome these limitations, advanced methods have been proposed for characterizing the materials that integrate the tracks and a few developments have been implemented in the monitoring of the structures under static and dynamic loading conditions. The information obtained has been essential to validate track models and to predict the transient response and the degradation behavior of the structures and their materials. This has pro-moted the introduction of new materials and construction methods with a view to improve the structural and environmental performances of railway infrastructures. The work presented herein provides an overview of current and advanced charac-terization and monitoring techniques, which are exemplified by a few applications concerning both R&D and consulting initiatives.

Nowadays, organizations are embracing digital transformation, investing in the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) tools and solutions. Advanced ICT technologies converge with operations technologies (OT), allowing machines, processes, employees, and products to be part of a single data framework, from data collection to analysis, interpretation, and assessment, which are the foundation for informed decision-making. Industry 4.0 takes advantage of emergent ICT to make the right decisions, at the right time, optimizing processes, minimizing risks and improving value chains. The main aim of the structural safety assessment and control of critical infrastructures, such as dams and bridges, is to protect people, property and the environment from harmful effects of failure or misoperation of infrastructures. This goal is achieved through Structural Health Monitoring and Control (SHMC) activities to monitor and track the life-cycle of critical infrastructures in such a way that it can provide sufficient information for long- and short-term decisions regarding structural safety assessment. The objective of this work is to present a reflection of the impact of the industry 4.0 trends on the structural safety assessment of critical infrastructures and, more specifically, to understand the level of maturity and to show how the leveraging of enabling technologies such as augmented reality, Internet of Things (IoT), additive manufacturing, cloud computing, big data and analytics are impacting the SHMC activities on critical infrastructures, which are traditional cyber-physical systems with complex sensor networks used to assess and control structural safety and health.

Neste capítulo descrevem-se sumariamente várias aplicações de modelos de escolha discreta em estudos de investigação em transportes e mobilidade urbana, compreendendo modelos do tipo “multinomial logit” e “mixed logit”. Os primeiros estudos de investigação desenvolveram metodologias originais para a quantificação de custos externos (ou externalidades) ambientais dos transportes, compreendendo um estudo pioneiro na avaliação dos custos externos marginais do ruído de tráfego rodoviário (dados da população/habitação expostas localizadas em áreas residências do município de Lisboa), sucedendo-se uma contribuição relevante ao nível da modelação para o estudo de externalidades do transporte aéreo (dados dos aeroportos europeus de Lyon e Manchester). Outras aplicações incluem um estudo para a avaliação de impactes territoriais (p. ex.. na relocalização de empresas) associado ao cenário de Alta Velocidade Ferroviária (caso da estação intermodal de Leiria, na linha ferroviária projetada Lisboa-Porto) e do impacto de sistemas avançados de informação ao condutor (dados de condutores da cidade de Atenas, Grécia). Posteriormente, apresentam-se aplicações no contexto da mobilidade urbana envolvendo a cooperação com dois municípios (Lagoa e Águeda) onde se avaliou o papel da implementação de incentivos, partilha de viaturas, disponibilização de bicicletas elétricas e da existência de infraestruturas cicláveis para alterar comportamentos, constituir mercados locais de carbono, promovendo, assim, a mobilidade sustentável e a progressiva descarbonização das deslocações de natureza funcional (casa-escola; casa-trabalho).

The Lisbon Living Lab will be centred on teenagers (young people 13 to 17 years of age) as they are a particular age group with specific needs and interests on public spaces, the relationship between teens and public spaces is very intrinsic, as public spaces may serve as a fundamental (play)ground for teenagers’ development. The Lisbon’s Alvalade neighbourhood will be living lab to explore how teenagers use and behaviour in urban fabric and what are they needs and preferences on public open spaces. The main objective is to engage teenagers in a process of the co-creation of urban spaces, by exploring the leading research question: “How can we capitalise on teenagers’ new-found love of the wired life (Thomas, 2013) to encourage them to be more outdoors?”

A via férrea balastrada é uma estrutura relativamente simples, mas exibe um comportamento complexo, nomeadamente devido às distintas solicitações dinâmicas a que está sujeita, e à forma como se comportam e interagem os seus diversos elementos. O método dos elementos finitos é particularmente adequado à análise do funcionamento destas estruturas, possibilitando a modelação das ações e a utilização de modelos constitutivos avançados para os diversos materiais que constituem o sistema, permitindo considerar a variação das características físicas e geométricas no espaço. Neste capítulo descreve-se e demonstra-se a aplicação de uma ferramenta de modelação numérica tridimensional, concebida especificamente para o cálculo da resposta dinâmica da via-férrea, cujo desenvolvimento, ao longo dos últimos anos, tem tido a contribuição dos autores. Para além da apresentação e validação da ferramenta de modelação, são apresentados estudos relativos à análise do comportamento da via em situações particulares.

O tempo decorrido (ou a distância percorrida) até à ocorrência de um evento, ou a duração do mesmo, podem ser analisados através de modelos de duração baseados em risco (hazard-based duration models), os quais têm sido amplamente utilizados em campos como a medicina, as ciências sociais e a engenharia industrial. Contudo, são relativamente escassos os estudos que aplicaram modelos de duração à engenharia de transportes. Este capítulo inclui dois exemplos de aplicação de modelos de duração à investigação em engenharia de transportes. O primeiro diz respeito às distâncias percorridas por veículos descontrolados em despistes ocorridos na Carolina do Norte (E.U.A.). O segundo refere-se ao tempo decorrido até à transferência modal nas deslocações para a escola de um conjunto de alunos de 162 turmas de 51 escolas do ensino básico em Portugal.