Developing an integrated sustainability and resilience framework of indicators for the assessment of low-carbon energy technologies at the local level

Sustainability indicators have been broadly used to assess energy technologies both at the national and local levels. However, very few studies have addressed the issue of resilience of energy technologies. Moreover, there is a lack of an integrated framework that combines both sustainability and resilience indicators for the assessment of energy technologies. The aim of this paper is to present the development of an integrated framework of sustainability and resilience indicators for the assessment of low-carbon energy technologies at the local level in Europe. The selection of indicators is based on a modified ‘3S’ approach, composed of literature review, self-validation, scientific validation, and social validation. The study incorporates local stakeholders’ feedback on the selection and validation of evaluation criteria based on a European survey. The vast majority of respondents approved and validated the indicators that were selected through the internal and experts’ validation steps.     

Assessment of the Total Factor Productivity Change in the English and Welsh Water Industry: a Färe-Primont Productivity Index Approach

The assessment of productivity change across companies and over time is of great importance for water utilities managers and regulators. In this paper, for the first time, we apply the Färe-Primont productivity index (FPI) to evaluate the productivity change for the 10 water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) and 12 water only companies (WoCs) in England and Wales during the years 2001–2008. The FPI is the only index that without price data allows making comparisons involving many firms and many periods. The results indicate that during the years 2001–2004 productivity improved which was mainly attributed to gains in efficiency whereas technical change remained constant, the exception being the year 2004. During the years 2005–2008 productivity showed a declining trend and any gains in efficiency were lost to the highly negative technical change on productivity growth. From a policy perspective, it has been illustrated the importance of using a reliable index to compute the productivity change of water companies when the performance of companies is used to set water tariffs. Finally, the decomposition of productivity change into several drivers allows water utilities and managers to identify the main factors on which they should act to improve productivity of the company.     

Lithofazielle Reservoircharakterisierung zur geothermischen Nutzung des Malm im Großraum München

The significant increase of geothermal energy production from the Malm reservoir in the greater area of Munich requires better understanding of the associated aquifer system. In this article, a good correlation between lithofacies and hydraulics is found on the basis of lithofacies evaluation of 17 geothermal wells. The main reservoir capacity within the Malm is made up by predominantly dolomitized massive limestones. Well analyses led to a simplified hydrostratigraphic profile, in which the lower Malm units (alpha to gamma) act as aquitards while Malm delta and epsilon units show a two-dimensional widespread and relatively homogeneous aquifer. Malm zeta can develop both aquifer- and aquitard-characteristics due to significant lateral facies changes. Facies changes depend largely on the basin position and subsequent dolomitisation is a crucial factor for the yield of wells drilled in this area. Based on these results, a new exploration strategy should focus more on facies characteristics than on structural features within the Malm Reservoir.     

Inorganic polymeric materials for passive fire protection of underground constructions

Protection against fire for reinforced concrete constructions is of great importance worldwide. There is a general perception that concrete structures are incombustible and thus, they have good fire‐resistance properties. In a real fire incident, however, concrete can be subjected to excess temperatures causing severe spalling and serious damage to concrete structures with significant economic cost and high potential risk to human life safety. Although a variety of fire‐protection methods exist, there is always a need for the development of new materials with improved thermophysical properties and low cost. Inorganic polymeric materials are promising from this point of view. They are incombustible, combining excellent physical, chemical, mechanical and thermal properties with low production cost and significant environmental benefits. In this work, the thermophysical properties of ferronickel slag‐based inorganic polymeric materials are studied. The results from the laboratory scale experiments are promising and indicative of the large‐scale behavior of material. The effectiveness of this material has to be proved in large‐scale experiments at higher temperatures simulating several severe fire scenarios as well as under all kinds of mechanical loading before concluding for its applicability as a fire protection system. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social tagging in recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions

Social tagging systems have grown in popularity over the Web in the last years on account of their simplicity to categorize and retrieve content using open-ended tags. The increasing number of users providing information about themselves through social tagging activities caused the emergence of tag-based profiling approaches, which assume that users expose their preferences for certain contents through tag assignments. Thus, the tagging information can be used to make recommendations. This paper presents an overview of the field of social tagging systems which can be used for extending the capabilities of recommender systems. Various limitations of the current generation of social tagging systems and possible extensions that can provide better recommendation capabilities are also considered.     

Realising an application environment for information-centric networking

It has been argued by many that the Future Internet should address information at the core of its operation. Prototypes have emerged to embody this new paradigm. Applications for such networks, however, are noted primarily by their absence. In spite of an appetite for Information-Centric Networking (ICN) applications, relatively little has come to fruition. We suggest that this is due to an unfavorable development environment, requiring applications to interface with the ICN substrate directly. This paper aims to answer this shortcoming by providing a middleware layer that aids the development of more advanced applications. We also present an application that leverages the middleware and answers a real-world problem concerning personalised media delivery. We argue that the development of this, and potentially other, application(s) is aided by the presence of such an application environment.     

Chemical Recycling of PET by Glycolysis: Polymerization and Characterization of the Dimethacrylated Glycolysate

Summary: In the framework of chemical recycling of polymers, leading to the generation of secondary value‐added products, PET flakes taken from post‐consumer soft drink bottles, were glycolyzed with DEG. The oligomers obtained were analyzed for their molecular weight and characterized by FT‐IR and POM. Subsequently, dimethacrylated oligoesters of PET glycolysate (PET‐GLY‐DMA) were synthesized by methacrylation of the glycolyzed PET product. The resulted monomer PET‐GLY‐DMA was studied by FT‐IR, POM and DSC. Thermal polymerization of this monomer was carried out at 80 °C in the presence of benzoyl peroxide as initiator. A UV‐curable formulation was also prepared on the basis of neat PET‐GLY‐DMA, as well as by mixing PET‐GLY‐DMA with styrene, using DMPA as photoinitiator. Nanoparticles of SiO₂ were dispersed into PET‐GLY‐DMA/styrene copolymers as reinforcing agents and the mechanical properties of resins formed were studied.

Preparation of methacrylated PET glycolysate.     

Analysis of the receiver response for a noncoaxial lidar system with fiber-optic output

The return signal of a noncoaxial lidar system with fiber-optic output is examined. The dependence of the overlap regions and the overlap factor of the system on the fiber diameter is calculated for several inclination angles between the laser beam and the optical receiver axes. The effect of central obstruction is included and both cases of Gaussian and quasi-Gaussian laser beam profiles are treated. The irradiance spatial distribution on the focal plane of the system is calculated and experimentally determined. Finally, an alignment procedure of the lidar system is described based on the comparison between the range-corrected lidar signal and the range-corrected exponentially attenuated Rayleigh backscattered coefficient.     

Search personalization through query and page topical analysis

Thousands of users issue keyword queries to the Web search engines to find information on a number of topics. Since the users may have diverse backgrounds and may have different expectations for a given query, some search engines try to personalize their results to better match the overall interests of an individual user. This task involves two great challenges. First the search engines need to be able to effectively identify the user interests and build a profile for every individual user. Second, once such a profile is available, the search engines need to rank the results in a way that matches the interests of a given user. In this article, we present our work towards a personalized Web search engine and we discuss how we addressed each of these challenges. Since users are typically not willing to provide information on their personal preferences, for the first challenge, we attempt to determine such preferences by examining the click history of each user. In particular, we leverage a topical ontology for estimating a user’s topic preferences based on her past searches, i.e. previously issued queries and pages visited for those queries. We then explore the semantic similarity between the user’s current query and the query-matching pages, in order to identify the user’s current topic preference. For the second challenge, we have developed a ranking function that uses the learned past and current topic preferences in order to rank the search results to better match the preferences of a given user. Our experimental evaluation on the Google query-stream of human subjects over a period of 1 month shows that user preferences can be learned accurately through the use of our topical ontology and that our ranking function which takes into account the learned user preferences yields significant improvements in the quality of the search results.