Search results for "Pollution"
showing 10 items of 2765 documents
Effects of tilling methods on soil penetration resistance, organic carbon and water stable aggregates in a vineyard of semiarid Mediterranean environ…
2018
Tillage, especially in semiarid Mediterranean environment, enhances the mineralization process of soil organic matter (SOM) and, in turn, decreases aggregate stability. Furthermore, continuous tillage leads to the formation of plough pan beneath the tilled layer. In the present study, we investigated the effect of an innovative self-propelled machine (spading machine, SM) for shallow tillage on SOM, water stable aggregates (WSA) and soil penetration resistance (PR). Such effects were compared to those of chisel plough (CP), rotary tiller (RT) and no tillage (NT). Each tilling method was applied up to a depth of 15 cm, whereas in NT only a brush cutter was used for weed control. Soil analyse…
Occupational hygiene in a Finnish drum composting plant
2005
Bioaerosols (microbes, dust and endotoxins) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were determined in the working air of a drum composting plant treating source-separated catering waste. Different composting activities at the Oulu drum composting plant take place in their own units separated by modular design and constructions. Important implication of this is that the control room is a relatively clean working environment and the risk of exposure to harmful factors is low. However, the number of viable airborne microbes was high both in the biowaste receiving hall and in the drum composting hall. The concentration (geometric average) of total microbes was 21.8 million pcs/m3 in the biowaste…
Modeling of 137Cs migration in soils using an 80-year soil archive: role of fertilizers and agricultural amendments
2008
An 80-year soil archive, the 42-plot experimental design at the INRA in Versailles (France), is used here to study long-term contamination by 137Cs atmospheric deposition and the fate of this radioisotope when associated with various agricultural practices: fallow land, KCl, NH4(NO3), superphosphate fertilizers, horse manure and lime amendments. The pertinence of a simple box model, where radiocaesium is supposed to move downward by convectional mechanisms, is checked using samples from control plots which had been neither amended, nor cultivated since 1928. This simple model presents the advantage of depending on only two parameters: α, a proportional factor allowing the historical atmosph…
QUALITY PARAMETERS OF DAIRY WASTEWATER IN THE MUREŞ COUNTY, ROMANIA
2017
The objective of this study was to investigate the main quality indicators of wastewater in a dairy factory located in Mureş County, with a water treatment plant built recently. The wastewater samples were tested for extractable matter, total suspended matter, fixed residue, biological oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, total suspended solids and pH values. The results indicated that pollution levels of wastewater samples tested were found high. This means that the method of treatment does not have the necessary effectiveness that can cause high load of effluent in NH4+, total suspended solids, Chemical Oxygen Demand - COD-Cr, Biochemical Oxygen Demand - BOD5, pH for dairy wastewater fr…
Uptake of actinides by calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H) phases
2018
Abstract The sorption of actinides (Th, U – Am) was studied in dependence of the solid-to-liquid (S/L) ratio (0.5–20.0 g/L) and the calcium-to-silicon (C:S) ratio. The C:S ratio was varied between 1.80 and 0.70 to simulate the changing composition of the C-S-H phases during cement degradation from high to low C:S ratios. The decrease of the calcium content in the C-S-H phases by time is accompanied by a decrease in pH in the corresponding suspensions from 12.6 to 10.2. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) of the C-S-H phases showed an increasing depletion of Ca on the surface with increasing C:S ratio in comparison to the composition of the solid phase as a whole. The sorption experiments…
Synthesis of α-aminonitriles using aliphatic nitriles, α-amino acids, and hexacyanoferrate as universally applicable non-toxic cyanide sources
2018
In cyanation reactions, the cyanide source is often directly added to the reaction mixture, which restricts the choice of conditions. The spatial separation of cyanide release and consumption offers higher flexibility instead. Such a setting was used for the cyanation of iminium ions with a variety of different easy-to-handle HCN sources such as hexacyanoferrate, acetonitrile or α-amino acids. The latter substrates were first converted to their corresponding nitriles through oxidative decarboxylation. While glycine directly furnishes HCN in the oxidation step, the aliphatic nitriles derived from α-substituted amino acids can be further converted into the corresponding cyanohydrins in an oxi…
Engineering faster transglycosidases and their acceptor specificity
2019
Transglycosidases are enzymes that have the potential to catalyze the synthesis of a wide range of high-value compounds starting from biomass-derived feedstocks. Improving their activity and broadening the substrate range are important goals to enable the widespread application of this family of biocatalysts. In this work, we engineered 20 mutants of the rice transglycosidase Os9BGlu31 and evaluated their catalysis in 462 reactions over 18 different substrates. This allowed us to identify mutants that expanded their substrate range and showed high activity, including W243L and W243N. We also developed double mutants that show very high activity on certain substrates and exceptional specific…
A study of weathered coal spectroscopic properties
2017
Abstract Current coal industry causes significant environmental pollution and the most air pollution deaths in the world, making the development of new eco-friendly applications one of the top priorities. Coal contains up to 50 % humic substances (HS), the majority of which is humic acid (HA). HA is well known for its beneficial properties and thus compounds extracted from coal can be used to develop new applications. To address this issue, we assessed structural composition of coal HS by measuring their spectroscopic properties. As the result, obtained spectra can be used to identify information about the molecules and thus allowing describing the composition of HS. The purpose of this stu…
Synthesis of bi- and tricyclic β-lactam libraries in aqueous medium
2007
Water as a solvent is not only inexpensive and environmentally benign, but may allow good reactivity. The present work focuses on the application of a modified Ugi reaction, i.e. the Ugi four-centre three-component reaction (U-4C-3CR), in aqueous medium to construct β-lactam libraries. All the attempted reactions could be successfully performed in water. The reaction conditions under which the precipitation process was effective were investigated; no further work-up or purification was necessary. In several cases when less water-soluble β-amino acids were used, the precipitated products were isolated easily by simple filtration. In other cases, evaporation of the solvent was appropriate for…
Contents of free amino acids in needles of Norway Spruce trees in relation to novel forest decline. Studies on trees from a site in the northern Blac…
1993
The free amino acid content in needles of Norway spruce trees (about 45-year-old) was determined by means of HPLC. The studied trees have been growing at a forestry site in the Black Forest which is characterized by a high impact of ozone and magnesium deficiency. Measurements were carried out on visibly healthy and on damaged trees on several dates during two vegetation periods and during the course of a day. The amino acids occurring at the highest concentrations were glutamate, arginine, aspartate, and glutamine. The typical seasonal changes in the content of free amino acids, with their minimum during summer, were disturbed in the needles of the damaged trees. Particularly in summer and…