Abstract
This paper is on wind energy conversion systems with full-power converter and permanent magnet synchronous generator. Different topologies for the power-electronic converters are considered, namely matrix and multilevel converters. Also, a new fractional-order control strategy is proposed for the variable-speed operation of the wind turbines. Simulation studies are carried out in order to adequately assess the quality of the energy injected into the electric grid. Conclusions are duly drawn. ©2010 IEEE.

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Abstract
The main purpose of this study was to examine the applicability of geostatistical modeling to obtain valuable information for assessing the environmental impact of sewage outfall discharges. The data set used was obtained in a monitoring campaign to S. Jacinto outfall, located off the Portuguese west coast near Aveiro region, using an AUV. The Matheron's classical estimator was used the compute the experimental semivariogram, which was fitted to three theoretical models: spherical, exponential and Gaussian. The cross-validation procedure suggested the best semivariogram model and ordinary kriging was used to obtain the predictions of salinity at unknown locations. The generated map shows clearly the plume dispersion in the studied area, indicating that the effluent does not reach the nearby beaches. Our study suggests that an optimal design for the AUV sampling trajectory from a geostatistical prediction point of view, can help to compute more precise predictions and hence to quantify more accurately dilution. Moreover, since accurate measurements of plume's dilution are rare, these studies might be very helpful in the future for validation of dispersion models.

Abstract
Histograms are a common technique for density estimation and they have been widely used as a tool in exploratory data analysis. Learning histograms from static and stationary data is a well known topic. Nevertheless, very few works discuss this problem when we have a continuous flow of data generated from dynamic environments. The scope of this paper is to detect changes from high-speed time-changing data streams. To address this problem, we construct histograms able to process examples once at the rate they arrive. The main goal of this work is continuously maintain a histogram consistent with the current status of the nature. We study strategies to detect changes in the distribution generating examples, and adapt the histogram to the most recent data by forgetting outdated data. We use the Partition Incremental Discretization algorithm that was designed to learn histograms from high-speed data streams. We present a method to detect whenever a change in the distribution generating examples occurs. The base idea consists of monitoring distributions from two different time windows: the reference window, reflecting the distribution observed in the past; and the current window which receives the most recent data. The current window is cumulative and can have a fixed or an adaptive step depending on the distance between distributions. We compared both distributions using Kullback-Leibler divergence, defining a threshold for change detection decision based on the asymmetry of this measure. We evaluated our algorithm with controlled artificial data sets and compare the proposed approach with nonparametric tests. We also present results with real word data sets from industrial and medical domains. Those results suggest that an adaptive window's step exhibit high probability in change detection and faster detection rates, with few false positives alarms.

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In this work, a laser sensor that uses the multipath interference produced inside a ring cavity to measure the power loss induced by a moving taper intensity sensor is described. The laser is created due to the virtual distributed mirror formed by the Rayleigh scattering produced in a dispersion compensating fibre when pumped by a Raman laser. Two laser peaks were formed, one of them is obtained by the Raman gain (1555 nm) inside the ring and the second is created by the combination of the Raman gain and the Rayleigh scattering (1565 nm). A taper sensor is used as displacement sensor and with the increases of losses the second laser peak amplitude is reduced. In the process the first peak is maintained constant and can be used as reference level.

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