Pedro Pereira

Nowadays technologies relate to so many aspects in our daily life that makes society eager for more and more ways of using it. To keep up with this new technological world, all economic sectors, from industry to services, are trying to adapt their products into this new reality. Presently, cultural heritage is already a field where the application of technology allows a static site to be converted into an intelligent environment, with detailed information about a specific monument or historical place, becoming more interesting, not only for local habitants, but also for tourists. This paper describes an application that allows tourists, managers and historical sites' habitants to experience a completely new way of discovering those places, offering a visit with detailed real-time information taking into account their personal interests. Tourists will have at their disposal a full set of optimized routes, combining their interests with their visiting time.

Electrical Protective Devices are key elements in the electrical network. Their purpose is to perform fault detection in electric power systems, by analysing power system voltages and currents. In order to achieve a more centralized control, protective devices can be connected using Web Services through a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. This work targets planning and specification of a mapping between Abstract Communication Service Interface (ACSI) Reporting and Device Profile for Web Services (DPWS) Eventing to achieve a better protective electrical devices control, obtaining an event based alert software system, replacing conventional polling-based systems.

High temperature superconducting (HTS) machines are recognized to offer several advantageous features when comparing to conventional ones. Amongst these, highlights the decrease in weight and volume of the machines, due to increased current density in conductors or the absence of iron slots' teeth; or the decrease in AC losses and consequent higher efficiency of the machines, even accounting for cryogenics. These concepts have been already demonstrated and some machines have even achieved commercial stage. In this paper, several alternative approaches are applied to electrical motors employing HTS materials. The first one is an all superconducting linear motor, where copper conductors and permanent magnets are replaced by Bi-2223 windings and trapped flux magnets, taking advantage of stable levitation due to flux pinning, higher current densities and higher excitation field. The second is an induction disk motor with Bi-2223 armature, where iron, ironless and hybrid approaches are compared. Finally, an innovative command strategy, consisting of an electronically variable pole pairs' number approach, is applied to a superconducting hysteresis disk motor. All these concepts are being investigated and simulation and experimental results are presented.