The Laboratory of Computational Methods in Engineering (LAMCE) has been working for over twenty years on the research, formulation and development of numerical methods in Computational Mechanics applied to Engineering, Geosciences and scientific visualization methods.

Currently, LAMCE is one of COPPE’s largest laboratories, with more than 80 employees, including professors, researchers, administrative technicians and interns, as well as around 100 master’s and doctoral students (data as of August 2013).

LAMCE’s scientific output includes more than 50 doctoral theses, 160 master’s dissertations, 10 undergraduate papers, more than 100 articles published in indexed journals and eight book chapters.

The laboratory has a broad portfolio of projects, with more than 130 technological initiatives carried out in partnership with companies, both national and international, as well as funding agencies. LAMCE also has more than twenty agreements and exchanges with national institutions and more than seventeen with international institutions.

ANP Human Resources Program
The creation of the Human Resources Program (PRH) of the National Petroleum Agency (ANP), PRH02, which aims to train Civil Engineering professionals for the Oil and Gas sector, is a consequence of the research carried out at LAMCE, in collaboration with CENPES. This program is dedicated to the training of human resources at undergraduate level (Petroleum Engineering at the Polytechnic School of UFRJ) and at postgraduate level (master’s and doctorate) linked to the Civil Engineering Program at COPPE/UFRJ.

Technology Transfer
The transfer of technological results has been carried out over the years through scientific publications, training of human resources and the realization of projects and technical consultancies.

Areas of Expertise

1. Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

   • Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications for analyzing tomographic images of carbonate rocks: lithological classification, texture segmentation and prediction of petrophysical properties.

   • Medical applications: identifying and estimating the severity of diseases based on x-ray and tomographic images.

   • Spatio-temporal forecasting with AI (computer vision), such as predicting rainfall from radar images.

   • Natural language processing for the oil industry.

   • Mobility estimation based on cell phone call records (CDR), applied to epidemiological modeling.

2. Computational Mechanics
   LAMCE has more than 30 years’ experience in developing and implementing simulators using discrete methods, such as finite elements, finite differences and discrete elements, for the numerical solution of engineering problems, with a focus on the oil, gas and energy sector.

3. Environmental Modeling

   • Research and development of atmospheric and oceanic processes using computer modeling on different spatial scales.

   • Pollutant dispersion modeling in the atmosphere, oceans and rivers, as well as climate modeling associated with climate variability and change processes.

4. Geophysical modeling

   • Development of computer algorithms and advanced high-performance computing (HPC) and AI techniques for simulating wave propagation in different physical media.

   • Improvement of seismic imaging in complex geological structures and interpretation of seismic data, with analysis of depositional environments and evaluation of petroleum systems.

5. Earth Observation Center

   • Monitoring and evaluation of changes in natural and artificial environments, contributing to the establishment of international standards for measurements of the earth’s surface, atmosphere and oceans.

   • Internal research and partnerships allow environmental data to be widely accessed and stored.

6. Digital Rock
   Development of digital image analysis techniques for predicting rock properties and characterizing reservoirs quickly and at low cost. The main focus is on characterizing carbonates, especially in the Brazilian pre-salt, since these rocks are extremely heterogeneous and difficult to characterize.

7. Remote Sensing Applied to the Oil Industry

   • Development and application of remote sensing techniques and analysis of images obtained by synthetic aperture radar (SAR), to detect oil seeps in oceanic regions and analyze their relationship with active petroleum systems.

   • Study of the sensitivity of terrestrial and aquatic biomes to environmental impacts caused by the oil industry.

   • Analysis and mining of spatial data with geostatistical and fuzzy logic techniques, as well as modeling of oil features using Machine Learning.

   • Mapping of natural hydrogen exudation and use of multispectral orbital images for environmental monitoring.

   • Data visualization and mapping on digital platforms.

8. Scientific Visualization

   • Research in Virtual and Augmented Reality, image processing, computer vision, mobile computing and tracking systems, with the aim of improving the visualization and scientific analysis of complex data.