Search results for "warm"
showing 10 items of 541 documents
A Review of “Risk, vulnerability and tourism in developing countries: the case of Nepal”
2013
Risk, Vulnerability and Tourism in Developing Countries aims at synthesizing a wide range of concerns with respect to global warming, sustainability, poverty and the existing material conditions th...
Global warming and tourism: chronicles of apocalypse?
2012
PurposeGlobal warming is a huge challenge faced by the mankind in the twenty‐first century and beyond. The paradox of ecology lies in the pervasive attitude of lay people who overtly condemn pollution but do not alter their individual practices. Unfortunately, the scientific community has still not reached unanimous conclusions about the causes or impacts of global warming. To close this gap, the present paper aims to stimulate discussion in two main senses: the relationship between industry and global warming; and the role of tourism in the coming decades.Design/methodology/approachBased on reading and criticism of many works, this paper provides a conceptual framework for readers to under…
Unwanted effects of European Union environmental policy to promote a post-carbon industry. The case of energy in the European ceramic tile sector
2016
Global warming combined with low carbon transition plans is threatening the future of high energy consumption industry sectors in the European Union (EU). The need to respond to environmental challenges is demonstrated by support for international level energy policies and legal requirements, such as the Kyoto Protocol which the EU supports, and increased EU-level environmental legislation and energy policies. The effect of these initiatives is gradually transforming industrial activities in the EU. However, since not all countries have adopted these policies, evaluation of their net effect needs to take account also of side-effects such as delocalization of industry activity and the legal …
Life cycle assessment of low temperature asphalt mixtures for road pavement surfaces: A comparative analysis
2018
The increasing fuel consumption demand, the accelerated pressure imposed by the depletion of 5 scarce raw materials and the urgent environmental protection requirements are forcing the change of 6 pavement industry and academia community’s research endeavors towards the development of low 7 emissions road paving technologies able to significantly reduce mixing and compaction temperature as 8 well as the consumption of virgin raw materials. One set of relatively recent technologies in the field of 9 pavement materials that aims at addressing those concerns are the warm mix asphalt (WMA). In fact, 10 they have the potential to allow the reduction of energy consumption and airborne emissions d…
Byproduct production of minor metals: Threat or opportunity for the development of clean technologies? The PV sector as an illustration
2013
Abstract Today, the fight against global warming and the coming hydrocarbon exhaustion involve a drastic increase of clean energies. These technologies resort to many minor metals which are byproduct of major metals. We will take the definition of Hageluken and Mesker (2010, Complex Life Cycles of Precious and Special Metals. In: Edition Thomas E. Graedel, Ester van der Voet (Eds.), Strungmann Forum Report, Linkages of Sustainability, MIT Press) to show precisely what minor metals are: “[they are] metals that have relatively low production or usage, which occur in low ore concentrations, are regarded as rare, or are not traded at major public exchanges”. We will analyze the byproduct status…
Assessing environmental performance trends in the transport industry: Eco-innovation or catching-up?
2015
Abstract This paper analyses the change in environmental performance that took place in the transport industry of 38 countries between the years 1995 and 2009. Data Envelopment Analysis techniques and directional distance functions are employed to compute Luenberger productivity indicators for the change in environmental performance and its determinants, namely, environmental technical change resulting from eco-innovation and catching-up with best available environmental technologies. Eight air pollutants account for the environmental contaminants from transport activities, and these are aggregated into three main categories of environmental pressures, namely, global warming, tropospheric o…
Passive congregation based particle swam optimization (pso) with self-organizing hierarchical approach for non-convex economic dispatch
2017
This paper proposes a passive congregation based PSO with self-organizing hierarchical algorithm approach for solving the economic dispatch problem of power system, where some of the units have prohibited operating zones. This Algorithm is known to perform better than conventional gradient based optimization methods for non-convex optimization problems. Conventional PSO algorithm is a population based heuristic search, employing problem of premature convergence. In this work, an innovative approach based on the concept of passive congregation based PSO with self-organizing hierarchical approach is employed to overcome the problem of premature convergence in classical PSO method.
Training Artificial Neural Networks With Improved Particle Swarm Optimization
2020
Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is popular for solving complex optimization problems. However, it easily traps in local minima. Authors modify the traditional PSO algorithm by adding an extra step called PSO-Shock. The PSO-Shock algorithm initiates similar to the PSO algorithm. Once it traps in a local minimum, it is detected by counting stall generations. When stall generation accumulates to a prespecified value, particles are perturbed. This helps particles to find better solutions than the current local minimum they found. The behavior of PSO-Shock algorithm is studied using a known: Schwefel's function. With promising performance on the Schwefel's function, PSO-Shock algorithm is util…
Energy and Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of asphalt pavements: A Scenario Analysis for Urban Roads
2018
This paper aims at calculating the life-cycle energy and the environmental impacts pertaining to roads management, including materials production, transportation, construction, maintenance, and rehabilitation. A life-cycle approach is applied to assess energy and environmental impacts of a typical Italian urban road, according to the ISO 14040 series. In more detail, the Authors assess the energy and environmental profile of different optimized scenarios of bituminous mixtures. The aim of scenario analysis is to identify the less impacting scenario from an energy and environmental point of view. For each analysed scenario, the contribution of each life-cycle step to the total impacts and th…
Overview and future challenges of nearly zero energy buildings (nZEB) design in Southern Europe
2017
In times of great transition of the European construction sector to energy efficient and nearly zero energy buildings (nZEB), a market observation containing qualitative and quantitative indications should help to fill out some of the current gaps concerning the EU 2020 carbon targets. Next to the economic challenges, there are equally important factors that hinder renovating the existing residential building stock and adding newly constructed high performance buildings. Under these circumstances this paper summarises the findings of a cross-comparative study of the societal and technical barriers of nZEB implementation in 7 Southern European countries. The study analyses the present situat…