基于可再生植物多酚的介孔炭材料合成及其环境和能源应用

介孔炭材料具有高比表面积、可调的组成和孔结构、良好的化学稳定性和导电性,被广泛用于环境、催化、能源等领域.碳源是介孔炭合成的关键.植物多酚,作为一种生物质碳源,具有低价、无毒、可再生的优点.且植物多酚具有黏附性和金属络合能力,被广泛用于合成介孔炭复合材料.尽管该领域已取得巨大进展,但关于植物多酚衍生介孔炭的综述还很少....     

Sequential ASE extraction of alkylphenols from sediments: Occurrence and environmental implications

The occurrence of alkylphenols (APs) including nonylphenol (NP) and octylphenol (OP) in the riverine sediments from the Pearl River Delta (PRD), South China was investigated and compared by Soxhlet extraction (S-APs) with dichloromethane and by sequential accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) (A-APs) with 1:6 toluene/methanol, respectively. Concentrations of OP and NP range from <1 to 463 ng/g dw and 31-21,885 ng/g dw, respectively, demonstrating that the contamination level of APs in the PRD is one of the highest in the world. Moreover, the A-APs contents are highly significantly related to and on average 1.5 times the S-APs contents. For sequential two ASE extractions, APs in the first extract accounts for 82.2-99.2% of their total contents in the sequential two extractions. The correlation analysis shows that S-APs and A-APs are both significantly associated with the contents of total organic carbon (TOC), suggesting that the variable extraction efficiency of these two methods is related to the presence of condensed organic matter in the sediments.     

Economic performance,environmental concerns,and renewable energy consumption: drivers of renewable energy development in Sub-Sahara Africa

This paper analyzes the drivers of renewable energy development and consumption in Sub-Sahara African countries for the period, 1980–2011. The fully modified ordinary least squares, dynamic ordinary least squares, and fixed-effects estimation techniques are used to evaluate the statistical significance of the determinants of renewable energy consumption. Results indicate that income has the desired positive, albeit statistically insignificant contribution to renewable energy consumption growth. This indicates that recent economic strength in the region has not been accompanied by increased development and consumption of renewable energy, in contrast to empirical evidence in other developing economies. A review of the possible reasons for this incongruence is presented. Also, increased consumption of renewable energy is associated with heightened concerns for climate change caused by pollutants such as carbon dioxide. Population and industrial expansion are statistically significant determinants of renewable consumption, and oil prices correlate negatively with renewable energy consumption.     

Meso-scale life-cycle impact assessment of novel technology policies: the case of renewable energy

Assessing the environmental risk of novel technological systems and of the European Union (EU) policies supporting them and regulating their implementation requires good understanding of (i) the pressure on the environment posed by the large-scale use of new technology, and (ii) the vulnerability of the receptor of this pressure. Generic life-cycle assessments (LCAs) provide exhaustive accounting of environmental pressure, yet they do not take into account the vulnerability of the receiving ecosystem. Generic studies of technology externalities fail to produce conclusions on the impacts in a certain area of the systems envisaged due to lack of site-specific information. The combined use of generic (LCA) and spatially referenced data offers new opportunities for comprehensively analysing the environmental impact of novel technologies. A novel information fusion methodology is suggested. Example applications are presented herein focusing on the evaluation of renewable energy technologies as an example of the implementation of meso-scale LCA for integrated environmental risk assessment of EU technology policies.     

Life cycle activity analysis: logistics and environmental policies for bottled water in Portugal

An innovative mathematical programming decision support model –Life Cycle Activity Analysis (LCAA)– is presented, integrating considerations of optimal allocations of resources and impacts upon the environment during the life cycle of products. LCAA is based on the classical formulation of activity analysis and on the life cycle assessment framework. The concept of linear activities is extended to embrace mass and energy fluxes over the entire life cycle of products including their environmental impacts. Special attention is given to the presence of loops in the product chains, such as those occurring when materials/products are recovered (reused, recycled.). An application brought from the Portuguese bottled water industry is described. The model features alternative activities for production technologies and product recovery strategies and permits the joint consideration of monetary costs and environmental burdens. The results obtained under five scenarios, including distinct disposal strategies and environmental constraints, are discussed.     

Rationality in decision- and policy-making: implications for strategic environmental assessment

A proper integration of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) into policy-making processes is considered critical to the success of SEA. Most of the work in SEA seems to be based on the assumption that the provision of rational information will help improve decision-making, but the literature points to other characteristics of real decision-making processes, including cognitive limitations, behavioural biases, ambiguity and variability of preferences and norms, distribution of decision-making over actors and in time, and the notion of decision-making as a process of learning and negotiation between multiple actors. All these are very relevant at the planning and policy level. In the policy sciences literature, some approaches may also hold promise for SEA, such as supporting an open learning process, variety in ways to support and roles to play in these processes, and paying more attention to the actor configuration and distribution of interests, as a basis for finding implementable and effective solutions to policy problems. The elaboration of these ideas holds promises as well as challenges for SEA.     

The impacts of environmental performance and development of financing decisions on economic sustainable performance: from the view of renewable and clean energy industry

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Developing green economy and mitigating environmental pollution have strategically important role in China's commitments against global climate...     

The cognitive basis of emergence: implications for design support

Emergent shapes play a significant role in the creative design process. Designers frequently visualize emergent shapes and structure their understanding of the design and their reasoning about it in terms of emergent entities and relations. In design research, effort has concentrated on developing computational models capable of representing emergent shapes. Much less attention has been paid to the cognitive processes that give rise to emergence. In cognitive science, however, emergence has been the subject of empirical study. It is suggested that both the study of perception and that of mental imagery can contribute to understanding the cognitive psychological basis of emergence and the nature of emergent shapes that arise. Relevant cognitive science research findings are reviewed in this paper. Based on these findings two main classes of emergence processes are developed. Their implications for the development of user-interactive computational models of emergent shapes are then discussed.     

Factors affecting renewable energy technology adoption policies of 50 states and district of Columbia in the USA

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Renewable energy policies and adoption of new renewable energy technologies in different states of the USA are not uniform. The factors affecting the...     

Maintenance, reliability and policies for orbital space station life support systems

The performance of productive work on space missions is critical to sustaining a human presence on orbital space stations (OSS), the Moon, or Mars. Available time for productive work has potentially been impacted on past OSS missions by underestimating the crew time needed to maintain systems, such as the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). To determine the cause of this apparent disconnect between the design and operation of an OSS, documented crew time for maintenance was collected from the three Skylab missions and Increments 4–8 on the International Space Station (ISS), and the data was contrasted to terrestrial facility maintenance norms. The results of the ISS analysis showed that for four operational and seven functional categories, the largest deviation of 60.4% over the design time was caused by three of the four operational categories not being quantitatively included in the design documents. In a cross category analysis, 35.3% of the crew time was found to have been used to repair air and waste handling systems. The air system required additional crew time for maintenance due to a greater than expected failure rate and resultant increased time needed for repairs. Therefore, it appears that the disconnect between the design time and actual operations for ECLSS maintenance on ISS was caused by excluding non-repair activities from the estimates and experiencing greater than expected technology maintenance requirements. Based on these ISS and Skylab analyses, future OSS designs (and possibly lunar and Martian missions as well) should consider 3.0–3.3 h/day for crews of 2 to 3 as a baseline of crew time needed for ECLSS maintenance.     

Potential assessment of floating photovoltaic solar power in China and its environmental effect

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - The growth of fossil global energy consumption is accompanied by greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming. To cope with global...     

Self-organized traffic flow at the lightless intersection: algorithms,policies and simulations of the environmental impact

We propose an urban intersection control scheme without the need of the traffic light (lightless control), which leads to potentially disruptive improvement of efficiency of the intersection traffic flow and much reduced fuel consumption and green house gas (GHG) emissions. We in particular show that such lightless intersection control can be achieved with mature technologies; it can be understood as an enhanced version of the connected vehicles, with the installing an intersection cruise control (ICC) device in the vehicle. Simple algorithms of such intersection control and intuitive traffic policies associated with it make the control scheme easy to implement with minimal impact on traditional driving behaviours. Moreover, such control allows a mixture of vehicles with and without ICC device installed, and can coexist with conventional intersection control with traffic lights. We quantify improvements of our lightless intersection control scheme with realistic large-scale numerical simulation of the vehicle drive cycles and the appropriate energy models. In contrast to traditional signallized intersection control where severe congestion develops, the proposed lightless intersection control leads to a smooth, self-organized traffic flow and lower fuel use and emissions. This performance is demonstrated even under high traffic inflow conditions. In many cases, the environmental impact of the presence of the intersection is found to be negligible.     

Last Time Buy and control policies with phase-out returns: a case study in plant control systems

This research involves the combination of spare parts management and reverse logistics. At the end of the product life cycle, products in the field (so called installed base) can usually be serviced by either new parts, obtained from a Last Time Buy, or by repaired failed parts. This article, however, introduces a third source: the phase-out returns obtained from customers that replace systems. These returned parts may serve other customers that do not replace the systems yet. Phase-out return flows represent higher volumes and higher repair yields than failed parts and are cheaper to get than new ones. This new phenomenon has been ignored in the literature thus far, but due to increased product replacements rates its relevance will grow. We present a generic model, applied in a case study with real-life data from ConRepair, a third-party service provider in plant control systems (mainframes). Volumes of demand for spares, defect returns and phase-out returns are interrelated, because the same installed base is involved. In contrast with the existing literature, this article explicitly models the operational control of both failed- and phase-out returns, which proves far from trivial given the non-stationary nature of the problem. We have to consider subintervals within the total planning interval to optimise both Last Time Buy and control policies well. Given the novelty of the problem, we limit ourselves to a single customer, single-item approach. Our heuristic solution methods prove to be efficient and close to optimal when validated. The resulting control policies in the case study are also counter-intuitive. Contrary to (management) expectations, exogenous variables prove to be more important to the repair firm (which we show by sensitivity analysis) and optimising the endogenous control policy benefits the customers. Last Time Buy volume does not make the decisive difference; far more important is the disposal versus repair policy. PUSH control policy is outperformed by PULL, which exploits demand information and waits longer to decide between repair and disposal. The article concludes by mapping a number of extensions for future research, as it represents a larger class of problems.     

Advanced functions and systems for operator support and plant management

The present paper describes developments by Siemens/KWU in the field of operator support, including plant management systems, which are currently planned and in some cases have already been introduced. The considerations involved in deciding to implement these developments are presented and the effects they will have on the daily work routine in the plant along with their advantages to nuclear power plant operating personnel are discussed in detail.     

One-pot synthesis of carbon nanotubes from renewable resource: cellulose acetate

In the present work, we report for the first time one-pot synthesis of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) by pyrolysis of cellulose acetate (CA) cross-linked with polyisocyanate in the fumed silica template. NiCl₂ was chosen as precatalyst for CNT growth. The diameter of CNTs is 24–38 nm and their wall thickness is 9–11 nm. The main role in the formation of CNTs by the pyrolysis of CA may be attributed to combination of closed macropores in the template formed by evolved CO₂ during cross-linking reaction and mesopores formed by silica particles. The macropores acted as microreactors while the mesopores templated catalytic nanoparticles. The importance of this method for CNT synthesis reported here consists of the utilization of readily available renewable resource—CA. Moreover the method does not require preliminary synthesis of catalyst, it is technologically simple (can be performed in the conventional tube furnace), and hence it is energetically efficient.     

The causal relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth: evidence from Europe

The European Union Renewable Energy Directive sets an objective of increasing the renewable energy share of the used renewable energy in the EU by 2020. The objective of this study is to analyze and compare the short-run and long-run relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth in 12 European Union countries and to derive implications for renewable energy policy. To do so, we apply panel vector error correction model using the available annual data from 1990 to 2014 on 12 European Union countries. Moreover, Granger causality test is conducted to examine whether there exists any causal linkage between economic growth and renewable energy consumption. The findings indicate the presence of unidirectional causality running from economic growth to renewable energy consumption in the short run. However, in the long run, a bidirectional causal relationship between the variables in question exists.     

Fully biodegradable natural fiber composites from renewable resources: All-plant fiber composites

Wood flour can be converted into thermoplastics through proper benzylation treatment, which introduces large benzyl group onto cellulose and partially deteriorates the ordered structure of the crystalline regions. By changing a series of parameters, like reaction temperature, concentration of aqueous caustic solution, species of phase transfer catalyst, etc., the extent of benzyl substitution is regulated within a wide range so that a balanced thermal formability and mechanical performance of the modified wood flour is obtained. By using the properly plasticized China fir sawdust as the matrix, both discontinuous and continuous sisal fibers are compounded to produce composites from renewable resources, respectively. These all-plant fiber composites are characterized by moderate mechanical properties and full biodegradability, and might act as alternative to petro-based materials in terms of structural applications.