Search results for "Environmental Biotechnology"

The SMAP and Copernicus Sentinel 1A/B microwave active-passive high resolution surface soil moisture product

2019

Abstract Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission of NASA was launched in January 2015. Currently, SMAP has an L-band radiometer and a defunct L-band radar with a rotating 6-m mesh reflector antenna. On July 7th, 2015, the SMAP radar malfunctioned and became inoperable. Consequently, the production of high-resolution active-passive soil moisture product got hampered, and only ~2.5 months (April 15th, 2015 to July 7th, 2015) of data remain available. Therefore, during the SMAP post-radar phase, many ways were examined to restart the high-resolution soil moisture product generation of the SMAP mission. One of the feasible approaches was to substitute the SMAP radar with other available SAR…

Special Issue: Water Management Strategies in Irrigated Areas

2016

The 2015 edition of the United Nations World Water Development Report highlighted that ‘water is at the core of sustainable development’. Water has upgraded the quality of human life, and any progress to achieve a more sustainable world will deal with the maintenance and/or the improvement of water management. Water demand has grown at more than twice the population rate in the XX century. By 2025, it is estimated that about 1.8 billion people will live in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be under stress conditions.

Profit change and its drivers in the English and Welsh water industry: is output quality important?

2014

Abstract The assessment of profit change over time and its drivers is essential to analyse firms' financial performance. This paper investigates profit change and its components for the 10 English and Welsh water and sewerage water companies over the period 1991–2008 and for three regulatory sub-periods. Profit changes and their drivers are computed following two approaches, namely: without controlling for water and sewerage quality issues, and after decomposing the output effect into high quality and low quality output effect. In both cases, profit change is decomposed into various factors such as quantity and price effect, technical change, efficiency change, resource mix, product mix, an…

The influence of solid retention time on IFAS-MBR systems: analysis of system behavior.

2018

A University of Cape Town Integrated Fixed-Film Activated Sludge Membrane Bioreactor (UCT-IFAS-MBR) pilot plant was operated at different values of the sludge retention time (SRT). Three SRTs were investigated at different durations: indefinitely, 30 and 15 days. The organic carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus removal, kinetic/stoichiometric parameters, membrane fouling tendency and sludge filtration properties were assessed. The findings showed that by decreasing the SRT, the pilot plant could maintain excellent carbon removal efficiencies throughout the experiments. In contrast, the biological carbon removal showed a slight nitrification and was slightly affected by the decrease of the SRT, s…

Modeling the decay of nitrite oxidizing bacteria under different reduction potential conditions

2018

[EN] Autotrophic growth and decay rates of ammonium and nitrite oxidizing bacteria (AOB and NOB, respectively) have a significant impact on the design and on the process performance of wastewater treatment systems where nitrification occurs. Literature data on the separate decay rates of AOB and NOB is scarce and inconsistent. In this study, batch experiments based on respirometric techniques were conducted to determine the NOB decay rates under different oxidation-reduction potential conditions, in order to widen the understanding of nitrite dynamics. The decay rate measured under anoxic conditions was 85% lower than under aerobic conditions, whereas under anaerobic conditions the decay ra…

Minor Losses and Best Manifold Position in the Optimal Design of Paired Sloped Drip Laterals

2018

Closure to “Simple Relationships for the Optimal Design of Paired Drip Laterals on Uniform Slopes” by Giorgio Baiamonte

2016

The author appreciates the interest of the discussers of the paper “Simple Relationships for the Optimal Design of Paired Drip Laterals on Uniform Slopes” and wants to express his gratitude to Joaquin Monserrat and Javier Barragan for the opportunity to discuss the issues they raised. In their discussion, they questioned the use of analytical relationships to derive the design variables that are required for the optimal design of paired sloped laterals. This paper detected the Best Manifold Position (BMP = 0.24) to design optimal paired laterals and, as the discussers mentioned, allows the methodology introduced by Baiamonte et al. (2015) to be applied. Thus, the issues they questioned and …

Explicit relationships for optimal designing rectangular microirrigation units on uniform slopes: The IRRILAB software application

2018

Abstract Many attempts have been made to provide easy tools for designing microirrigation units. However, most of these have dealt with numerical solutions, which require many trial-and-error attempts and time-consuming iterations, performed by applying the basic hydraulic equations from the manifold to the end of both the downhill and the uphill sides of the laterals. Recently, analytical procedures to optimally design paired drip laterals on uniform slopes were proposed, providing readily obtainable results and energy saving. Although these analytical solutions can be practically applied, they only make it possible to design a one-lateral unit; to be really interesting for practical appli…

Simple Relationships for the Optimal Design of Paired Drip Laterals on Uniform Slopes

2016

Microirrigation plants, if properly designed, allow water use efficiency to be optimized and quite high values of emission uniformity to be obtained in the field. It is known that disposing paired laterals, in which two distribution pipes extend in opposite directions from a common manifold, contribute to increasing water use efficiency. Recently, an analytical procedure has been proposed to optimally design paired drip laterals on uniform slopes under the assumption of neglect: (1) the variations of the emitters’ flow rate along the lateral, and (2) the local losses due to the emitters’ insertions. However, this procedure is not readily usable for every geometric and hydraulic characterist…

Design of concave and convex paired sloped drip laterals

2017

Abstract Properly designed microirrigation plants allow water use efficiency to be optimized and quite high values of emission uniformity to be obtained in the field. Disposing paired laterals so that two distribution pipes extend in opposite directions from a common manifold contributes to provide more uniform pressure to all laterals in thesystem. Towards this end, an analytical procedure to optimize the uniform pressure when designing paired drip laterals on uniform slopes has recently been proposed, based on the assumption that the variations of the emitters’ flow rate along the lateral and the local losses due to the emitters’ insertions could be neglected. More recently, an easy metho…