Search results for " Sustainability and the Environment"
showing 10 items of 1854 documents
Multifarious pretreatment strategies for the lignocellulosic substrates for the generation of renewable and sustainable biofuels: A review
2020
Abstract Currently major part of the world’s energy requirements is fulfilled by fossil resources. Severe economic and environmental problems along with their limited resources are still a major issue. Long-term environmental and commercial concern has focussed into huge research in the past decades to replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy. The main focus of energy research is lignocellulosic substrates, which seems to be the best for energy application due to easily availability, cost-effective and environment favourable production process. Therefore, lignocellulosic materials provide economical, environmental and energetic benefits with an alternative to traditional or hig…
Analysing the effects of power swing on wind farms using instantaneous impedances
2020
Abstract Most of the grid disturbances happen due to the presence of faults and power swing. This article focuses on power swing in view of the amount of penetration of renewable energy resources especially the wind farms. There are two sections. First section approached power swing by deriving a mathematical expression which would be able to track the locus of impedance in time domain and subsequently analyze resistance and reactance simultaneously with respect to time. It used a grid comprising of generator, transmission line and load. The derived expression was compared with a power swing generated using RTDS model and the results were analyzed in R-X plane. Second section analyses the i…
A Tool to Assess Architectural Education from the Sustainable Development Perspective and the Students' Viewpoint
2021
[EN] Architectural education plays a fundamental role in achieving sustainable development by training future professionals who can contribute to sustainability through their practice. Nevertheless, to ensure the introduction of sustainable development in the education of future architects, it is fundamental to understand what is being done and what could be improved. Despite this, a big gap has been detected in the assessment of architectural education in Spain and worldwide. Thus, a close-ended questionnaire for students has been designed based on the outcomes from a literature review, exploratory interviews with specialists, and the qualitative analysis of two schools of architecture. Ad…
2020
AbstractForecasting crop yields is becoming increasingly important under the current context in which food security needs to be ensured despite the challenges brought by climate change, an expanding world population accompanied by rising incomes, increasing soil erosion, and decreasing water resources. Temperature, radiation, water availability and other environmental conditions influence crop growth, development, and final grain yield in a complex nonlinear manner. Machine learning (ML) techniques, and deep learning (DL) methods in particular, can account for such nonlinear relations between yield and its covariates. However, they typically lack transparency and interpretability, since the…
Errors and uncertainties introduced by a regional climate model in climate impact assessments: example of crop yield simulations in West Africa
2015
16 pages; International audience; The challenge of estimating the potential impacts of climate change has led to an increasing use of dynamical downscaling to produce fine spatial-scale climate projections for impact assessments. In this work, we analyze if and to what extent the bias in the simulated crop yield can be reduced by using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) regional climate model to downscale ERA-Interim (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis) rainfall and radiation data. Then, we evaluate the uncertainties resulting from both the choice of the physical parameterizations of the WRF model and its internal variability. Impact assessments w…
Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Sports Entrepreneurship
2020
Sports entrepreneurship has been considered an important part of sports organisations when overcoming crisis situations. The aim of this study is to determine the impact of the crisis derived from COVID-19 on sports entrepreneurship and whether there are differences in the prediction of entrepreneurship on service quality in non-profit sports clubs. To this end, 145 sports clubs were analysed before and after the outbreak of the virus in society. Paired sample-t tests were carried out to determine the differences in variables studied before (Time I) and after (Time II) the COVID-19 outbreak, and correlations and hierarchical linear regressions were used to analyse the relationship between t…
Flying-Related Concerns among Airline Customers in Finland and Sweden during COVID-19
2022
COVID-19 hit the global economy hard in early 2020, and airline industry was among the biggest commercial victims. Governments closed borders, the virus scared off travelers and the aircraft stayed on the ground to a large extent. The forecasted record year turned out to be the worst in the history of aviation. This study focused on the concerns of airline customers and analyzed the differences between the customer behavior in two focus markets, Finland and Sweden. The article is based on a questionnaire and the answers of 2004 airline customers. The results show that even though the overall COVID-19 strategy was very different between the focus markets, the same concerns still arose. The m…
Porous 3D Printed Scavenger Filters for Selective Recovery of Precious Metals from Electronic Waste
2018
Selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printing is used to fabricate highly macroporous ion scavenger filters for recovery of Pd and Pt from electronic waste. The scavengers are printed by using a mixture of polypropylene with 10 wt% of type‐1 anion exchange resin. Porosities and the flow‐through properties of the filters are controlled by adjusting the SLS printing parameters. The cylinder‐shaped filters are used in selective recovery of Pd and Pt from acidic leachate of electronic waste simply by passing the solution through the object. Under such conditions, the scavenger filters are able to capture Pd and Pt as anionic complexes with high efficiency from a solution containing mixture of dif…
Characterization of the Solid State Properties of Anodic Oxides on Magnetron Sputtered Ta, Nb and Ta-Nb Alloys
2012
Tantalum oxide, niobium oxide and Ta-Nb containing mixed oxides were grown by anodizing sputter-deposited Ta, Nb and Ta-Nb alloys of different compositions. A photoelectrochemical investigation was performed in order to estimate the band gap and the flat band potential of the oxides as a function of their composition. The band gap of the investigated Ta-Nb containing mixed oxides changed monotonically between those estimated for Ta2O5 (4.1 eV) and Nb2O5 (3.4 eV) and in agreement with a proposed correlation between the Band gap of an oxide and the difference of electronegativity of the oxide constituents. From the differential capacitance curves recorded in a wide range of electrode potentia…
Considering syntrophic acetate oxidation and ionic strength improves the performance of models for food waste anaerobic digestion.
2021
Current mechanistic anaerobic digestion (AD) models cannot accurately represent the underlying processes occurring during food waste (FW) AD. This work presents an update of the Anaerobic Digestion Model no. 1 (ADM1) to provide accurate estimations of free ammonia concentrations and related inhibition thresholds, and model syntrophic acetate oxidation as acetate-consuming pathway. A modified Davies equation predicted NH3 concentrations and pH more accurately, and better estimated associated inhibitory limits. Sensitivity analysis results showed the importance of accurate disintegration kinetics and volumetric mass transfer coefficients, as well as volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and hydrogen up…