Search results for "2300"

Dewaterability of CAS and MBR Sludge: Effect of Biological Stability and EPS Composition

2018

The dewaterability of sludge from two conventional activated sludge (CAS) and three membrane bioreactor (MBR)-based wastewater treatment plants is investigated prior to and after anaerobic digestion. The concentration and composition of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) mostly affect the dewaterability of all raw sludge samples. Better sludge dewaterability is observed when the concentration of proteins, carbohydrates, uronic acids, and humic acids is below approximately 400, 250, 200, and 40 mg/L, respectively. In contrast, the specific resistance to filtration (SRF) increases in the sludge samples with a higher EPS concentration. The MBR results in a lower EPS production and a uron…

Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Wastewater Treatment Plants on a Plantwide Scale: Sensitivity and Uncertainty Analysis

2016

This paper presents the sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of a mathematical model for greenhouse gas emission (GHG) and energy consumption assessment in wastewater treatment plants. A sensitivity analysis was carried out (using two different methods) to determine which model factors have the greatest effect on the predicted values of the GHG production. Further, an uncertainty analysis was carried out to quantify the uncertainty of the key model outputs, such as carbon dioxide production from activated sludge treatment. The results show that influent fractionation factors, which characterize influent composition, have an important role on direct and indirect GHGs production and emission.…

Management of Cultural Landscapes: What Does this Mean in the Former Soviet Union? A Case Study from Latvia

2009

Concern about changing cultural landscapes has increased recently, with the advent of the European Landscape Convention placing signatory countries in a position of having to develop action for protecting and managing cultural landscapes. In countries of the former Soviet Union the landscape underwent many changes as a result of agricultural collectivisation and its aftermath. This situation has been analysed for six sample rural municipalities (pagasts) in Latvia, one of the three former Soviet countries to join the European Union (EU), using maps from the period 1901 to 1927 (to represent the ‘traditional landscape’) and 1997 orthophotographs updated to 2000 (to represent the ‘post-Soviet…

Weathering of evaporites: natural versus anthropogenic signature on the composition of river waters

2015

Weathering of evaporites strongly influences the chemistry of continental runoff, making surface waters poorly exploitable for civil uses. In south-central Sicily, this phenomenon is worsened by the occurrence of abandoned landfills of old sulphur and salt mines. The industrial evolution of the Bosco-S. Cataldo mining site leaved two landfills from the early exploitation of a sulphur mine followed by that of a kainite deposit. In particular, the weathering of these landfills leads the dissolved salt (TDS) values up to about 200 g l−1 in the Stincone–Salito Stream waters. This process induces the V, Cr and Fe desorption from sediments and particulates in the aqueous phase under reducing cond…

Trigeneration and Polygeneration Configurations for Desalination and Other Beneficial Processes

2018

Abstract The integration of renewable energy sources (geothermal, biomass, and solar) and desalination systems into novel polygeneration plants is investigated. Two main arrangements are considered: geothermal (GP) and biomass (BP) polygeneration. Both systems include concentrating photovoltaic/thermal solar collectors, a multieffect distillation system for seawater desalination, a single-effect LiBr-H2O absorption chiller, storage tanks, heat exchangers, balance-of-plant devices; a biomass auxiliary heater and geothermal wells are also included, in BP and GP, respectively. The systems can provide electricity and hot water, used for space heating, cooling, domestic hot water production, and…

Functional principal component analysis for multivariate multidimensional environmental data

2015

Data with spatio-temporal structure can arise in many contexts, therefore a considerable interest in modelling these data has been generated, but the complexity of spatio-temporal models, together with the size of the dataset, results in a challenging task. The modelization is even more complex in presence of multivariate data. Since some modelling problems are more natural to think through in functional terms, even if only a finite number of observations is available, treating the data as functional can be useful (Berrendero et al. in Comput Stat Data Anal 55:2619–2634, 2011). Although in Ramsay and Silverman (Functional data analysis, 2nd edn. Springer, New York, 2005) the case of multiva…

Diseased Social Predators

2017

Social predators benefit from cooperation in the form of increased hunting success, but may be at higher risk of disease infection due to living in groups. Here, we use mathematical modeling to investigate the impact of disease transmission on the population dynamics benefits provided by group hunting. We consider a predator-prey model with foraging facilitation that can induce strong Allee effects in the predators. We extend this model by an infectious disease spreading horizontally and vertically in the predator population. The model is a system of three nonlinear differential equations. We analyze the equilibrium points and their stability as well as one- and two-parameter bifurcations. …

Robust H∞ Filtering for a Class of Complex Networks with Stochastic Packet Dropouts and Time Delays

2013

Published version of an article in the journal: The Scientific World Journal. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/560234 Open Access The robust H∞ filtering problem is investigated for a class of complex network systems which has stochastic packet dropouts and time delays, combined with disturbance inputs. The packet dropout phenomenon occurs in a random way and the occurrence probability for each measurement output node is governed by an individual random variable. Besides, the time delay phenomenon is assumed to occur in a nonlinear vector-valued function. We aim to design a filter such that the estimation error converges to zero exponentially in the mean …

Recent Advances in Complex Networks Theories with Applications

2014

So close, so different: geothermal flux shapes divergent soil microbial communities at neighbouring sites

2016

This study is focused on the (micro)biogeochemical features of two close geothermal sites (FAV1 and FAV2), both selected at the main exhalative area of Pantelleria Island, Italy. A previous biogeochemical survey revealed high CH4 consumption and the presence of a diverse community of methanotrophs at FAV2 site, whereas the close site FAV1 was apparently devoid of methanotrophs and recorded no CH4 consumption. Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques were applied to describe the bacterial and archaeal communities which have been linked to the physicochemical conditions and the geothermal sources of energy available at the two sites. Both sites are dominated by Bacteria and host a negligib…