Management gaps analysis: a case study of groundwater resource management in New Zealand

The primary objective of this project is to identify gaps, whether real or perceived, that hinder effective groundwater management in New Zealand. These gaps show as gaps in information, gaps in implementation, gaps in technological and management tools, and gaps in understanding of fundamental processes. The secondary objective is to propose a management strategy to close the identified gaps. Several methods are used to meet these objectives: surveys distributed to selected staff in each regional council; the review of various written reports; the analysis of land-use databases; and private consultation within each regional council. Results show that groundwater management in New Zealand is generally reactionary with the main gaps being in strategic planning and national guidelines. Most gaps appear to be predominantly information and implementation issues. In some cases there are gaps in the understanding of fundamental processes within an aquifer system, including the long-term effects of land-use on groundwater quality. An adaptive management approach is suggested as a means of closing these gaps.     

Experimental characterisation of the drying effect on uniaxial mechanical behaviour of mortar

The main objective of this present study was to evaluate, for a standard mortar, the drying effect on its mechanical behaviour. Numerous uniaxial compression tests were thus performed with loading-unloading cycles. They were carried out on different samples previously preserved under various conditions of conservation: preserved from desiccation, air drying and rapid drying at 60°C. The obtained results showed significant influences of these conditions on the material behaviour (increase in strength, decrease in Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio) and the necessity of taking into account the coupling effects between mechanical—poromechanical behaviours and drying.     

Miniaturized coplanar waveguide stop band filters based on multiple tuned split ring resonators

A novel compact stop band filter consisting of a 50 /spl Omega/ coplanar waveguide (CPW) with split ring resonators (SRRs) etched in the back side of the substrate is presented. By aligning SRRs with the slots, a high inductive coupling between line and rings is achieved, with the result of a sharp and narrow rejection band in the vicinity of the resonant frequency of the rings. In order to widen the stop band of the filter, several ring pairs tuned at equally spaced frequencies within the desired gap are cascaded. The frequency response measured in the fabricated prototype device exhibits pronounced slopes at either side of the stop band and near 0 dBs insertion loss outside that band. Since SRR dimensions are much smaller than signal wavelength, the proposed filters are extremely compact and can be used to reject frequency parasitics in CPW structures by simply patterning properly tuned SRRs in the back side metal. Additional advantages are easy fabrication and compatibility with MMIC or PCB technology.     

On the capacities of bipartite Hamiltonians and unitary gates

We consider interactions as bidirectional channels. We investigate the capacities for interaction Hamiltonians and nonlocal unitary gates to generate entanglement and transmit classical information. We give analytic expressions for the entanglement generating capacity and entanglement-assisted one-way classical communication capacity of interactions, and show that these quantities are additive, so that the asymptotic capacities equal the corresponding 1-shot capacities. We give general bounds on other capacities, discuss some examples, and conclude with some open questions.     

Gamma-irradiation-induced Ag/SiO2 composite films and their optical absorption properties

Small Ag particles or clusters dispersed mesoporous SiO₂ composite films were prepared by a new method: First the matrix SiO₂ films were prepared by sol-gel process combined with the dip-coating technique, then they were soaked in AgNO₃ solutions followed by irradiation of γ-ray at room temperature and in ambient pressure. The structures of these films were examined by X-ray diffraction (XRD), high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HRTEM), and optical absorption spectroscopy. It has been shown that the Ag particles grown within the porous SiO₂ films are very small, and they are isolated and dispersed from each other with very narrow size distributions. With increasing the soaking concentration and an additional annealing, an opposite peakshift effect of the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) was observed in the optical absorption measurements.     

Low Temperature Physics at the Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Pulsés in Toulouse

An overview over past and present activities and future developments at the Toulouse pulsed magnetic field facility is given, both as far as technical developments of the infrastructure, as well as low temperature physics performed at the LNCMP are concerned.     

Joint scheduling and power control supporting multicasting in wireless ad hoc networks

This paper addresses the problem of power control in a multihop wireless network supporting multicast traffic. We face the problem of forwarding packet traffic to multicast group members while meeting constraints on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the intended receivers. First, we present a distributed algorithm which, given the set of multicast senders and their corresponding receivers, provides an optimal solution when it exists, which minimizes the total transmit power. When no optimal solution can be found for the given set of multicast senders and receivers, we introduce a distributed, joint scheduling and power control algorithm which eliminates the weak connections and tries to maximize the number of successful multicast transmissions. The algorithm allows the other senders to solve the power control problem and minimize the total transmit power. We show that our distributed algorithm converges to the optimal solution when it exists, and performs close to centralized, heuristic algorithms that have been proposed to address the joint scheduling and power control problem.     

Modification of ASM3 for the determination of biomass adsorption/storage capacity in bulking sludge control.

The selector activated sludge (SAS) systems are known to prevent excessive growth of filamentous microorganisms responsible for bulking sludge, but these systems were hardly ever modelled. This study aimed to develop a model capable of predicting rapid substrate removal in the SAS systems. For this purpose, the Activated Sludge Model No. 3 (ASM3) was extended with three processes (adsorption, direct growth on the adsorbed substrate under aerobic or anoxic conditions). The modified ASM3 was tested against the results of batch experiments with the biomass originating from two full-scale SAS systems in Germany. The endogenous biomass was mixed with various readily biodegradable substrates (acetate, peptone, glucose and wastewater) and the utilisation of substrate (expresses as COD) and oxygen uptake rates (OURs) were measured during the experiments. In general, model predictions fitted to the experimental data, but a considerable number of kinetic (5) and stoichiometric (2) parameters needed to be adjusted during model calibration. The simulation results revealed that storage was generally a dominating process compared to direct growth in terms of the adsorbed substrate utilisation. The contribution of storage ranged from 65-71% (Plant A) and 69-92% (Plant B).