Distributed sensing for water quality monitoring provides important data that can be used to evaluate the characteristics of water according to specific requirements. The measurement of water parameters in extended areas requires the utilization of a high number of sensing nodes including multiple sensors, which can make difficult the management of the sensing devices to obtain high reliability of the system. The work presents a solution of autonomous water quality measuring nodes that puts together elements from the IEEE1451.X standard for smart sensors and UHF RFID technology. The novelty of the implemented solution is the utilization of a Virtual Transducer Electronic Data Sheet and an RFID based selection of the individual sensing channel characteristics. Hardware design and implementation are described in the paper.

The paper deals with the flexibility test of software frameworks for measurement applications, and, in particular, of the Flexible Framework for Magnetic Measurements (FFMM), developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in order to satisfy the new magnetic measurement requirements and to provide a uniform platform to handle all magnetic measurement applications. FFMM is designed to be flexible, reusable, maintainable, and portable. As part of the characterization of the framework from the point of view of both software quality and performance, this paper presents a metric suitable for its flexibility characterization. Experimental results are also provided for typical application scenarios of FFMM.

In 1499, weights and measures in Portugal were object of a general reform and copies of the national standards of the marco were distributed all over the country to the counties. In the same decade the Portuguese Discoveries were in its highest level and the maritime route to India and America discovery are the most well known achievements. But the Portuguese were also the first travelling in the Pacific and arriving to the Moluccas Islands China, Japan and too Australia. Fernão de Magalhães, the first navigator making the circumnavigation around the globe (1519-1522) was a Portuguese although under the Spanish flag. It is now recognized that one of the purposes was to establish new routes for the trade and the vessels were equipped with a copy of the marco to be used in trading with other civilizations. This means that it was the first measuring standard to be used and compared with other local standards as there are descriptions of the travels.

Investigations of the dynamic processes in hydraulic models of hydro plants showed that the control over the water supply is essential. Transient events, that is, the start or stop of the turbines or pumps must be simulated. Especially, in pumped storage plants we have to investigate transient operations which are evolving from the rapid changes between the pumping and the generating mode. In hydraulic models there are also cases of repeated operation (danger of resonance) that have to be simulated. For the simulation of the pump or turbine an experimental unit was built. With this unit a high flexibility of the parameter in the time diagram was achieved.

The method called instrumented indentation test (IIT) emerged as a technique capable to characterise several materials in nanoscale, like nanostructural material, thin film, ceramic material, etc., independently of hardness. The acceptation of this new technique requires, of course, reliable test results where, one of the way to obtain this confidence is to knowing the sources of the testing error in order to minimise them.
This work has as main objective to present a simple methodology to get one of these sources by a mathematical computation to determining the geometry of the Berkovich diamond indenter used in the IIT focusing on the very tip of this indenter up to 200 nm height by adjusting the curves that better describe this range.