Publications

Results from the application of Persistent Scatterers Interferometry in Lisbon Metropolitan Area revealed two previously unknown subsiding urban areas: one (Laranjeiras) is located in the center of Lisbon; another (Vialonga) is to be found toward the North, in an industrial region crossed by Lisbon's main highway and railway lines. The two subsiding sectors are bordered by sharp velocity gradients, and the subsidence pattern appears partially delimited by mapped geologic faults. Surface geology and urbanization alone are unable to explain the phenomena. In the Vialonga area, the historical record of water pore pressure shows a clear decline of the levels (up to 65 m in 27 years), providing evidence of over-exploitation of groundwater resources. Limited information from wells drilled inside and outside the subsidence area points to a spatial correlation between the subsidence and the water pressure levels, and suggests that faults could be acting as hydraulic barriers in the aquifer system. The surface subsidence detected is probably caused by compaction of a clay-rich Oligocene-aged aquitard, led by over-exploitation of adjacent aquifers. The same Oligocene aquitard layer is present in the Laranjeiras area, immediately bellow a multi-layered sand–clay–limestone Miocene aquifer, but further work is needed to diagnose the possibility of over-exploitation of groundwater here. In this work we were able to independently confirm the PSI results, by comparing autonomous PSI results processed for the same geographical areas, and by comparing PSI with leveling and continuous GPS derived subsidence velocities, whose close match provided further ground validation of the space-borne PSI technique.

ABSTRACT: Local engineering precision networks are currently used to monitor the displacements of large dams, with safety control purposes. These one, two or three-dimensional networks are local, be-cause they are tied to local reference frames, and they are precision networks, because they aim at millimetric, or even submillimetric, accuracy. The most important obstacles to such an accuracy are the instrumental and environmental systematic errors. The atmospheric refraction, which cau-ses curvature of the path of the electromagnetic waves and changes its propagation velocity, is the major source of systematic errors. Effective measurement quality control strategies are of utmost importance to guarantee the quality of the results (displacements). The paper presents a quality control strategy supported by random quadratic forms that result from the decomposition of the Mahalanobis squared norm of the residuals vector. The strategy is compared to the well known da-ta-snooping method with regard to the quality control and parameter estimation performances.

Apresentam-se, neste artigo, os conceitos da inferência paramétrica Bayesiana, no contexto da estimação dos parâmetros de amostras aleatórias normais. São abordados temas práticos não triviais, tais como as distribuições anteriores informativas e a sua eliciação paramétrica pelo método empírico. A finalizar o artigo, é apresentado um exemplo de aplicação da metodologia Bayesiana a um problema de estimação paramétrica no âmbito da engenharia de estruturas.

O presente trabalho introduz sumariamente os conceitos básicos da teoria da decisão estatística

A tunnel has been under construction for the Lisbon Metro network on the muddy bed of river Tagus. Anincident during the jet-grouting for the muddy soil treatment led to flooding of a specific sector of thetunnel and to the need for repair works. Consequently, a decision has been made to monitor with a shorttime resolution the movements of that sector before, during and after reparation works. This includesthe period in which the tunnel will be in use for its regular operation, with commuters using the subway.Given these general conditions with severe inter-visibility limitations, as well as the cost restraints, anautomatic monitoring system has been designed and put in place, resorting to four LEICA TC2003motorised total stations and to the available commercial software, LEICA GeoMoS. The computationalprocedure of the mentioned software implies a network configuration, in which every total station set upneeds a cluster of control points associated with that particular setup in order to perform a spaceresection. However, it is often difficult to find stable points inside a tunnel under monitoring let aloneduring repair works. Therefore, to overcome this difficulty, adjustment software - EpochSuite

The paper presents a Bayesian procedure for predictive analysis of the measurements of short permanent GNSS baselines. A posterior predictive ellipse, which is used to assess the temporal stability of the baseline, is computed with basis on a set of initial observations. The procedure was applied to the measurements of three baselines installed in a large concrete dam recently built in the Northeast of Portugal. The baselines have a common reference point in the rock mass near the dam, which is supposed to be stable along time, and the other extremities in the crest of the dam. The GNSS measurements were carried, out along six months, with dual frequency receivers and choke ring antennae. For each baseline, c. 5000 hourly positions were computed and subject to the analysis.

The protection of harbours in coastal areas, that are exposed to the action of the sea waves, is made by breakwaters. During the phase of design of new breakwaters or the rehabilitation of existing ones, the evaluation of effectiveness of the shape and of the protective elements to save the harbour, 3D scale models are built inside wave basins or wave flumes. In the testing phase, water waves are generated, and the resulting impact on the breakwater model is periodically evaluated to study the hydraulic and structural behaviour under predefined sea-wave conditions. This study proposes a methodology to estimate displacements of concrete blocks of the outer layer, also called protection layer, of rouble-mound breakwater models. These blocks are placed in the areas where it is expected that action of the waves is stronger. The combination between the 3D information of a point cloud survey and the visual information of a digital image is a key factor for estimate the spatial location of the geometric centre of the blocks. The location of a block centre point, at different instants, gives its spatial displacement. The equipment used for data acquisition tests were a Kinect V2 sensor and a digital camera, with which were obtained the main data sets for this work: RGB imagery and 3D Point Clouds. The data collected by this allowed the generation of point clouds (X, Y and Z) and orthomosaics, both fundamental for the determination of displacements of the blocks. Indeed, displacements detection results from the determination of the spatial coordinates of the several locations of the Geometric Centre of each block, which is in fact the main outcome of this study. It is expected to serve as a contribution to the laboratory teams working at the Harbours and Maritime Structures Division of the Department of Hydraulics and Environment.

Maritime structures such as breakwaters have a large economic importance as they protect the harbours, the ships and their contents from sea waves. Rubble-mound breakwaters are one of the most used types of these structures and they are composed by rocks forming a trapezoidal cross-section covered with rock or concrete blocks whose goal is to dissipate sea wave energy. The breakwaters are often exposed to severe meteorological conditions, especially during storms, which may move the blocks from their original position, reducing the protection capability of the structure. An early detection of those changes is of the utmost importance as it may minimize costs both for the breakwater reconstruction and for the consequences of not having it working properly. Structural health monitoring of breakwaters is often performed through visual inspections. Due to the shape of the structure, the size and dimensions of the protective blocks, and the fact that it is surrounded by the sea, in situ measurements are difficult to perform. Photographic surveys using unmanned aerial vehicles are sometimes hard to accomplish due to the strong winds that are observed at the coast. Multitemporal InSAR techniques can overcome the hindrances of the mentioned methods and provide a useful way to identify the damages.In this study, damage assessment is performed for a breakwater located at Ericeira town, Portugal, using multitemporal InSAR techniques. This breakwater was built in the 1970s and it is exposed to northwestern Atlantic Ocean waves which are very energetic and led to severe damages several times. From 2008 to 2010 the structure was reconstructed and expanded in order to increase its protection capability. A dataset of 70 SAR images acquired between 2011 and 2015 by the sensor on board COSMO-SkyMed 4 was used to evaluate changes occurred at the breakwater during this time interval. Displacement and amplitude time-series as well as coherence matrixes are analysed for damage assessment using the SARPROZ© software. Time-series analysis shows a good agreement between changes at displacement and amplitude data and the occurrence of storms at the Portuguese coast. Spatial patterns are found that enable the identification of the most fragile areas of the breakwater which may need maintenance interventions in the near future.

Breakwaters are protective and sheltering structures which aim to provide either protectionfrom waves and currents for people and goods at the coast or sheltering conditions for shipsand boats moored at the port, thus ensuring that port operations are performed in safeconditions. For that reason, occurrence of damages on such structures usually impliessignificant economic losses, such as harbour inoperability.In Portugal where severe sea states due occur, rubble mound breakwaters (RMB) are the mostcommon type of these breakwater structures. The most conventional structure of a RMBconsists in a core of a mix of fine and coarse material covered by one or two layers of naturalrock or/and artificial concrete blocks that forms the so-called armour layer.In order to predict damages that may occur in RMB

The roof structure of MEO Arena (previously known as Atlantico multipurpose Pavilion) is a pioneering example of large glued laminated timber (glulam) structures. At the time of its construction (1995) for the EXPO

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Atmospheric effects are still a limitation to the application of InSAR techniques for displacement measurement. In this study, zenith total delay (ZTD) values derived from global navigation satellite system (GNSS) are used to correct interferograms from tropospheric effects. Displacement measurements are obtained from the corrected interferograms through a persistent scatterer interferometry approach. The influence of different interpolation methods on the construction of ZTD maps is tested through two different algorithms: cubic spline and ordinary kriging. Differences are observed between the cumulative displacement maps obtained with both interpolators, but atmospheric effects are still present, possibly due to the small number of available GNSS stations.

A comunicação apresenta uma análise preditiva Bayesiana das medições de uma base

O calendário Gregoriano não é mais do que uma reforma do calendárioJuliano, devido a Júlio César, que adaptou os formalismos romanos a uma antigaestrutura solar de origem egípcia. Este ensaio descreve a história do calendárioGregoriano e dos calendários da bacia do Mediterrâneo e do Oriente Próximo,com ele mais ou menos aparentados.

Interferometric synthetic aperture RADAR is an applied geodesy technique, which enables displacement measurement through satellite images. A literature review of the technique principles and of previous studies regarding its application to structural health monitoring allowed the identification of a few bottlenecks to the operational usage of this cost-effective technology for monitoring purposes.Three research lines were defined. First, a data mining strategy was developed to extract structural behaviour information from displacement time series from thousands of points on the region of interest, with tens of observation epochs each. Second, displacements from this technique were integrated into a previously existing monitoring system and were used to expand it to a larger number of points on the structure and to its surroundings. Third, an experimental infrastructure was deployed in order to perform several tests for displacement validation and uncertainty assessment. The infrastructure included a new model of artificial reflector to the satellite signals, purposefully developed in the scope of this study.The developed methods enabled the successful monitoring of different types of civil and geotechnical structures. Slope behaviour around water reservoirs was assessed during both the reservoir first impoundment and regular operation. Differential displacements were detected on building-blocks at a cultural heritage urban area and concrete arch dam responses to temperature loads were identified. The experimental work showed the achieved displacements agreed with those of other geodetic techniques and uncertainties around 2 mm were obtained for the measurements.In conclusion, interferometric synthetic aperture RADAR is a promising technique, able to provide useful information for structure monitoring, such as aiding in the planning of in situ monitoring activities and in identifying space-time patterns in structural behaviour. Thanks to its spatial coverage, observation period of a few days and achieved displacement uncertainty, it is advantageous to complement existing monitoring systems with data from this technique.

Este relatório apresenta uma metodologia para controlo dos erros instrumentais e avaliação da incerteza de medição dos distanciómetros eletromagnéticos (DEM) usados na observação geodésica de barragens de betão. A metodologia, que é baseada numa base de teste existente no campus do LNEC, é ilustrada com a análise de seis medições da base, entre 2010 e 2014, com os dois DEM utilizados pelo Núcleo de Geodesia Aplicada.

The monitoring systems have two main objectives: (i) to evaluate the safety conditions and durability of the infrastructures and to develop a better understanding about their day-to-day behaviour; (ii) to detect the occurrence of special events that might jeopardize the safety of the structure. To reach the first objective it is mandatory to create a database as most extensive as possible to support an analysis of the structural behaviour. Regarding the second objective near real-time automatic systems must be created in order to analyse the recorded data and establish limits of alert with alarm warnings when those limits are exceeded. This R&D project aims to develop a measurement system, based on GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems), suitable to monitor large scale civil engineering structures and infrastructures, particularly bridges and dams. This monitoring system final objective is to measure the displacements of some selected points of the structures. These points should be the most important ones to characterize the general behaviour of the monitored structure. The advantages of using a GNSS system are undeniable: this equipment is robust, operates under all weather conditions, does not require intervisibility between the monitored points and the reference points, uses an external tridimensional reference systems, and provides an extremely accurate time-reference frame. The GNSS positioning is affected by a numerous set of errors due to natural and artificial phenomena. These errors should be reduced as much as possible, in order to obtain good estimated distances between the observed satellites and the antenna of the receivers. There are well known observation and observation combination techniques (phase differences measurements, relative positioning and Precise Point Positioning - PPP) that allow to strongly reduce, or sometimes even eliminate, most of the errors. Using carefully selected observation and processing techniques it is possible to obtain high-precision GNSS positioning. The RTK (Real Time Kinematics) is the more recent high-precision positioning GNSS technique. It allows us to obtain high quality coordinates in almost real-time. When used in conjunction with top grade receivers (able to do observations at high frequencies) the RTK seems to be able to monitor high frequencies displacements of structures. Unfortunately the positioning precision is only at the centimetre level. To reduce this uncertainty it will be used short baselines and processing techniques based on the use of various filters and methodologies for multi-sensor observations fusion. It is precisely in the development of these techniques that the actual research project is focused. After the monitoring system specification, several techniques will be developed and tested in order to be included in a reliable measurement system that will meet the specified requirements. To define the monitoring system demands the following items have been addressed: - Requirements of the monitoring system in view of the behaviour of the selected structures; - Acquisition of know-how on data acquisition systems and in-site monitoring equipment; - Identification, characterization and analysis of software available for data processing.

A inspeção visual assistida pode ser utilizada para a monitorização de ensaios de flexão atéà rotura de vigas de madeira, tendo sido usado um sistema de observação com fotografia evídeo. Foi desenvolvido um programa para identificação automática das imagens da viga,que registaram alterações significativas, tendo a fratura sido delineada através de técnicasde análise de imagem orientada por objetos.

A extração de informação a partir de imagens digitais tem-se tornado numa prática comum em váriasáreas do conhecimento. Foi desenvolvido um programa em MATLAB para permitir a um utilizador nãoespecializado a realização de tarefas simples de processamento digital sobre imagens adquiridas porvários géneros de sensores.

O relatório apresenta os princípios gerais da termografia e a sua aplicação prática no levantamentotérmico de paramentos de barragens de betão para apoio ao acompanhamento da evolução depatologias. Apresentam-se aplicações relativas ao levantamento térmico dos paramentos de jusantedas barragens do Alto Ceira II, Alto Ceira e Cabril. O levantamento realizado na primeira barragem,que se encontrava na fase final de construção e ainda vazia, permitiu a avaliação da qualidade dosresultados obtidos (temperaturas superficiais do paramento) por comparação com valores medidospor termómetros embebidos no betão. Nas outras duas barragens, ambas apresentando problemasde infiltrações, permitiu avaliar a aplicabilidade das imagens térmicas na deteção de ressurgimentosde água na superfície do betão, geralmente indicativas da existência de repasses de água.

O presente relatório apresenta uma experiência de aquisição de fotografias aéreasutilizando um veículo aéreo não tripulado (VANT) para recolha de informação geográfica doquebra-mar da Ericeira, com o objetivo de testar a capacidade destes dados para produçãode ortofotomapas e modelos numéricos de superfície para monitorização de infraestruturasao longo do tempo. A experiência foi realizada numa colaboração entre o LNEC e aempresa SINFIC, SA

Neste relatório faz-se a síntese dos métodos disponíveis para realizar a Inspecção Visual Assistida(IVISA) de paramentos de barragens de betão, no que diz respeito às várias fases envolvidas: aquisiçãode imagens, processamento, monitorização temporal e arquivo. Apresentam-se os recursos existentesno LNEC e a adquirir, assim como os custos associados.

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Este relatório apresenta um procedimento para a avaliação da incerteza de medição de equipamento de nivelamento geométrico de precisão e ainda regras para o teste estatístico de hipóteses sobre essa incerteza de medição, preconizadas na segunda parte da norma ISO 17123, exemplificados com um ensaio comparativo de um nível automático numérico Wild NA 3003 e de um nível automático Wild NA2, com um micrómetro óptico acoplado.

O trabalho aborda simultaneamente a distribuição do desvio padrão da amostra aleatória normal e a distribuição do desvio padrão do modelo de Gauss-Markov, designados genericamente por desvio padrão empírico. Após mostrar que o desvio padrão empírico é um estimador excêntrico que subestima o desvio padrão da amostra ou do modelo, conforme o caso, são apresentadas correções de excentricidade. É também tratada a estimação do desvio padrão da amostra e do modelo em cenário Bayesiano, com diferentes distribuições anteriores. O trabalho é rematado por casos de estudo baseados na simulação de amostras normais e por um exemplo concreto relacionado com o controlo da precisão de um distanciómetro eletromagnético.

O presente trabalho apresenta uma metodologia genérica para a regularizaçãode problemas inversos lineares mal colocados e a sua aplicação às redes altimétricas eplanimétricas usadas na monitorização de deslocamentos de pontos notáveis de grandesbarragens por métodos da Geodesia Aplicada. A metodologia é ilustrada por intermédiode três casos de estudo.

This paper deals with the beta-binomial model, which is an important stochasticmodel within the scope of the Bayesian statistical inference. After a short review of the binomialand beta distributions, the paper presents the closed formulae for the posterior probabilitydensity function of the binomial trial parameter and for the prior predictive and forthe posterior predictive probabilities of the successes in binomial experiments. A descriptionof the Bayesian methodology to test different hyper-parameters for the conjugate priorprobability density functions of the beta family is also presented. Finally, the beta-binomialmodel is illustrated with a study case related to the quality control of the geodetic observationof large dams.

O presente trabalho, além de uma revisão sintética da abordagem frequencista,trata da abordagem Bayesiana da análise de regressão linear multivariada. É apresentadauma compilação de procedimentos e fórmulas para a estimação dos coeficientes da regressão,sob três cenários de informação anterior. Finalmente, o trabalho ocupa-se dosproblemas da predição de respostas e da comparação de modelos de regressão.

The work presents the theoretical definitions of the gamma, multi-gamma, digammaand trigamma functions as well as operational approximations to compute their values.A more precise alternative, due to Robert Windschitl, to the traditional approximationof the gamma function by the Stirling

O trabalho descreve os princípios da análise Bayesiana, usando como caso deestudo a amostra aleatória normal identicamente distribuída. Após um curto preâmbulohistórico, são resumidos, na Secção 2, os conceitos mais importantes da análise frequencista.Nas secções seguintes, são abordados os temas Bayesianos mais importantes, taiscomo a estimação, pontual e regional (Secção 5), e o teste de hipóteses sobre osparâmetros da distribuição da amostra (Secção 6). As distribuições anteriores de Laplace,Jeffreys e conjugada normal-gama invertida são apresentadas na Secção 4. O problemada eliciação paramétrica das distribuições anteriores conjugadas é tratado na Secção 7.Palavras Chave: distribuições anteriores e posteriores, divergência de Kullback-Leibler,eliciação paramétrica, factor de Bayes, fórmula de Bayes, verosimilhança.

Este trabalho define uma estratégia, apoiada o mais possível nas disponibilidades do LNEC, para a calibragem dos distanciómetros electromagnéticos (DEM) usados pelo Núcleo de Geodesia Aplicada na observação geodésica de barragens.

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