Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In the Chilean electricity market, end users are classified as free customers and regulated customers. The analysis of its behavior is important for the design and application of public policies in the sector. In this research, the monthly billed electricity data of Chilean regulated customers is studied during the 2015-2021 period, to detect patterns and predict the category to which they belong. K-Means algorithms are used for pattern detection, K-NN for customer category prediction, and principal component analysis to determine the most significant variables within the data set. With K-Means it was found that the data is grouped according to the type of client, with K-NN a model was obtained that allows predicting to which type of clients the data belongs, and with the analysis of principal components it was found that the variables customer type, year, and month, are the most important in the data set. More than 96% of the customers analyzed correspond to the residential type, who consumed 50% of the energy invoiced during the study period and imposed the monthly seasonality of the data. The machine learning algorithms applied to the data made it possible to generate models to group them, to predict their category, and to establish the most significant variables in terms of their variance.

 

Variables such as climate change, droughts, hurricanes, deforestation, and the indiscriminate use of pesticides constantly trigger the presence of insect pests in the country, as well as potential invasive pests that find the necessary conditions to establish themselves and cause damage to sensitive crops in the country. Agricultural entomology focuses on the study of insects associated with agriculture-related plants, both harmful and beneficial, giving increasing importance to the environment and relying on available biotechnological advances to conserve and increase biodiversity in agricultural areas. On the other hand, there are several new technologies that can be used in agricultural entomology, such as computer vision. Computer vision or machine vision is the area of research around how computers view and understand digital images and/or videos.  This study aims to give an approach to the current situation and potential uses of computer vision in agricultural entomology and to examine in a timely manner how it can be applied in Panama. The challenges and techniques of computer vision and artificial intelligence applied to entomology are evaluated through the selection of current bibliography published on the subject. This work also aims to identify gaps and opportunities with a view to becoming an updated reference for future work. Several bibliographic references were analysed, from which the information contained therein was extracted and the applicability of the different techniques in Panama is presented.

The oil cost in the international market has a direct impact on the cost of electricity.  In Panama, there are mechanisms to compensate for these variations through the fuel variation correction factor (CVC). This mechanism allows the retail electricity rate to be adjusted following variations in oil. In the period from 2015 to 2019, oil fluctuated greatly, reaching over 75 USD per barrel and falling below 30 USD per barrel.  These fluctuations affected energy costs in Panama, although not precisely in the way that was expected according to the conditions established for the electricity market.  To study this phenomenon, a database has been built with the coefficients of the electricity rate and a software tool has been developed that allows calculations of the bill for energy consumption in the period from 2015 to 2019, for customers of the low voltage group without demand (BTS).  With the information collected, it was determined that there is a moderate correlation between the cost of oil in the international market and the bill for electricity consumption in Panama of 0.7 and 0.66 for customers with consumption of 500 kWh (BTS2) and 1000 kWh (BTS3) respectively, when the CVC is used, and 0.366 and 0.365 when not used.  Likewise, it is found that for every 100 kWh consumed, the bill increases (or decreases) by 7.25 hundredths for each USD increase (or decrease) in the price of a barrel of oil.

Faced with the problem of energy supply that the country presents, it is of great importance to improve energy efficiency. Aiming at cleaner and more sustainable technologies, such as the wind energy initiative that refers to obtaining kinetic energy from the wind, which seeks to improve the efficiency of energy production and reduce water stress. Currently, Panama is increasingly committed to the diversification of the energy sector, through the implementation of wind generation, which leads us to a challenge in the management of waste once they reach their useful life, especially blades. These blades are made of materials that are extremely difficult to recycle, so the reuse of wind turbine blades is the fundamental solution proposed below, mainly due to their cost and accessibility. In this document, some options are presented to solve this problem of waste management in the wind industry at the end of its useful life cycle. Considering some reuse and recycling alternatives to give the blades architectural purposes in the form of future projections of bicycle shelters, recreational parks, bus stops, and applications of other processes such as pyrolysis to treat the blades, thus modifying the characteristics of the waste.

Current complex construction projects and high levels of changes, require innovative methodologies focused on guiding and improving the skills of the professionals who manage them. For this reason, the actual research has the goals of incorporating the benefits of applying agile techniques in the traditional methodology for the management of construction projects in Panama and standardizing its application to optimize its results. Inductive, quantitative, and qualitative methods were used. Through content analysis, norms, magazines, and project management standards were analyzed, reliable information to create new knowledge. To collect and link data qualitatively, the questionnaire applied to project management and construction professionals in Panama from 2020 to 2021 was used, its quantitative analysis was carried out using the SPSS statistical program. The Delphi Technique validated the Hybrid Methodology, with experts chosen for their skills and experience. 79% of project managers apply a project management methodology, the traditional ones being the most used. They agree that the time factor is the most problematic compliance objective and that external factors affect project results. It was validated that in the economic construction sector it is appropriate to apply the hybrid management methodology with a result of 3,903, 4 being "very appropriate". This research showed that the traditional-agile project management methodologies are complementary, that by standardizing traditional processes with agile methods based on the characteristics of each project, results are improved, meeting the objectives of the project and those involved.

En el año 2017, se realizaron una serie de estudios geofísicos en la comunidad de Finca 30, provincia de Bocas del Toro, noroccidente de Panamá y cuyo objetivo se focalizó en evaluar el uso combinado de los resultados obtenidos a través de la refracción sísmica (velocidad de onda P) y el análisis multicanal de ondas superficiales (velocidad de onda S) vía el cociente de Poisson para la detección de capas freáticas someras en el sitio de estudio. En esta comunidad se estableció un perfil de 30 m de longitud en donde se utilizó un sismógrafo para estudios de onda P y S, con 16 geófonos de alta frecuencia para el primero y 12 de baja frecuencia para el segundo y adicionalmente, un prototipo de inyección de corriente alterna de 400 V con un arreglo tipo Schlumberger a fin de verificar los resultados de la prospección sísmica; el procedimiento para estudios de onda P se basaron en la norma ASTM D5777-18, para el de onda S en el documento sobre el proyecto InterPACIFIC, y para el sondeo eléctrico, la norma ASTM D6431-18. El rango de valores del cociente de Poisson obtenido (0.47-0.49), y 10.7 ohm.m a una profundidad de 1.8 m sugieren la existencia de una zona saturada la cual fue corroborada a través de una perforación desarrollada en el sitio. Gracias a estos resultados, los acuíferos superficiales podrían ser aprovechados para abastecimiento de la población y para evaluar el nivel de afectación de la capacidad portante para futuros proyectos de ingeniería civil.

Current efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals to combat and eradicate hunger have led different specialized sectors of society to launch themselves in search of ways that lead to this end. In this sense, the research, development, and innovation (R+D+i) approach has generated various optimized methods to obtain the greatest possible benefits, through important contributions such as the development of varieties with greater resistance to pests and diseases, adverse weather conditions, use of biological agents, agriculture in a controlled environment, among others. The objective of this document is to show the advances in the application of magnetic fields as a tool to improve the productivity of different crops, as part of the techniques of recent application in the agricultural field. Considering the main treatment methods, application characteristics, and the explanation of the possible effects caused in plant entities. Attempts have been made to use scientific articles from different databases, but with significant levels of reliability, measured through the impact indices involved. With a few exceptions, the review of documents published, preferably in the last ten years, and based mostly on specialized conceptualizations was used as a way to find out what is going on with this topic right now.

Bio-inspired design is consciously developed through research, study and analysis of how living organisms have developed solutions to overcome the challenges of the natural world. In this way, the field of bio-inspired materials contributes to the design of structures and the manufacture of materials, with the aim of combining known natural structures with a specific material. The main objective of this research is to be inspired by the vegetation of Panama and America, to identify, interpret, extract, design, verify and optimize a structure for energy absorption applications. This paper summarizes concepts about bioinspiration, common characteristics in biological materials according to several authors in conjunction with designs of thin-walled structures. The structures, properties and anatomy of the coconut palm (Cocos nucifera) are studied as part of the inspiration, being these plants part of the vegetation of Panama. The bioinspiration method and the technical route are also presented, which correspond to the search for biological strategies in plants to manage structural forces, analysis of mechanical properties and structural characteristics of the palm. In this way, designs tending to the optimization of structural elements, such as the case of cylindrical tubes, emerge through experimental and numerical analysis methods, which can be carried out to know the advantages, disadvantages and efficiency of new designs.

The optimization applied in the industry allows to improve the use of services such as water, electricity, gas, and heating, thus achieving a better production and a reduction of costs. With this, an autonomous, dynamic, adaptive, and interconnected network is achieved, which facilitates new scenarios of use and benefits. Today, a large part of companies has air conditioning units to maintain a suitable temperature for employees and equipment, seeking a good performance. However, the uncontrolled use of these devices leads to high electricity consumption, which often results in a large portion of the monthly expenses of these companies. The objective of this work is to propose a system based on information and communication technologies (ICTs) to adequately control the operation time of air conditioning units to reduce total electricity consumption in companies that have equipment that requires special environmental conditions, for example, telecommunications and data storage equipment. This problem is formulated as a convex optimization problem, the optimal solution of which is obtained using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) method. Based on this optimal solution, an algorithm is proposed, which was validated using the MATLAB design and simulation software. The results show that the proposed optimization technique helps to improve the performance of the air conditioning units, by achieving better electricity consumption, greater efficiency and useful life of the equipment and a reduction in the cost of production.