Waste pyrolysis and generation of storable char

Sustainable cities require the generation of energy from waste that cannot be economically reused or recycled. This study focuses on slow pyrolysis that can generate a high yield of char along with liquid and gas products from waste. Char is high in energy content, storable and transportable with low cost so that it can be used as an intermediate medium for high efficiency energy conversion. Pre‐processed municipal waste pellets, wood and grass were pyrolysed in a batch type reactor for a final temperature ranging from 350 to 700°C, and the char products were characterized. The mass yields of char ranged from 55 to 20% for the tested temperature range, recovering 70–30% of energy and 62–30% of carbon in the raw material. The gross calorific value of char was 30–35 MJ kg^?1 on a dry ash free basis. The ash content of raw materials was a key parameter for the quality of char, since its proportion increased by 2–4 times in char depending on the mass yield. A significant amount of volatile metals such as Hg, As and Pb in the waste sample was evaporated at 500°C. Therefore, evaporation of volatile metals was another important parameter in determining the pyrolysis temperature and fuel residence time. The char did not show significant morphological change in the tested range of temperatures. It was concluded that slow pyrolysis of waste for char production should be performed below 500°C in order to increase the energy yield and also to reduce the evaporation of heavy metals. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Autoxidation of polyunsaturated fatty esters on Silica

The stability of unsaturated methyl esters of fatty acid adsorbed on silica gel and silicic acid was studied by gas liquid chromatographic estimation of disappearance relative to a saturated internal standard. Variables included silica-ester ratio, agitation, adsorbent particle size, and degree of unsaturation. Under the conditions of the experiment, destruction of substrate unsaturated ester at 80 C was more a function of time than of unsaturation or initial purity.     

Evidence for singlet oxygen in the air oxidation of surface adsorbed 2,5-diphenylfuran

Heating 2,5-diphenylfuran on a silicon or titanium dioxide surface results in its conversion tocis-dibenzoylethylene. This is considered an indication of singlet oxygen intermediacy. No significant reaction occurs with the solid or in solvents other than acetone. A singlet oxygen quencher inhibits the reaction, and a free radical scavenger has little effect. The differences between the surface reaction and lack of reactivity in solution may arise from several causes. These include local forces involved in adsorption, topographical and geometric effects, and metal catalysis. Knowledge of factors influencing singlet oxygen formation under nonphotochemical conditions has potential practical application.     

Increase in buildings sustainability by using renewable materials and energy

Sustainable development could be seen as indispensable condition for survival of civilization. Construction sector is a field with immediate need for reducing environmental impacts. Sustainability measures applied for buildings could produce very efficient results to the people. The paper provides the methods of construction sustainability increase by researching, developing, and applying the technologies which use renewable materials and energy. The paper analyzes the cases of both a solar eco house which was built of original prefabricated straw-bale panels and was designed to use direct solar energy; and an educational project promoting straw-bale construction and seeking to mitigate climate change. The project results have shown the need of spreading information on sustainable building methods to be accepted by wider society and to be applied to the construction industry. Monitoring of solar ecohouse has proved that direct solar energy gains are significant in reducing heating degree-days in 55°N latitude and in allowing to save half the energy needed for heating.     

Long-term trends in the multidisciplinarity of some typical natural and social sciences,and its implications on the SSH versus STM distinction

Macro-level domains of the science system, usually referred to as STM and SSH disciplines, have often been contrasted from various perspectives, regarding the characteristic composition of their publication channels, referencing or communication practices, and the related consequences in research evaluation. It is also long been conjectured that social science fields (along with the humanities) are more multidisciplinary than natural science fields, regarding their patterns of scholarly communication (“multidisciplinarity thesis”). The main goal of the study reported in this paper is twofold: (1) to revisit the differences in multidisciplinarity between the SSH versus STM domain, via a long-term longitudinal survey including the most recent trends, and (2) to utilize, for this task, state-of-the-art metrics and models of Interdisciplinary Research, taking into account their limitations, that is, the data sources that most naturally feed these models (typically the Web of Science). Our conclusions provides further confirmation, from the perspective of multidisciplinarity, that the concepts of SSH and STM are mainly tools for communication, rather than empirically valid constructs.     

Global Communications Newsletter January 2010

Includes: ITU and Ministerial Seminar on Switchover from Analog to Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting in Central and Eastern Europe (Belgrade, Serbia); Is It Time for Specialized Telecommunication Engineering Education in the United States?; IEEE ComSoc Beijing Chapter Newsletter; FuturICT 2009 - The First Hungarian-Japanese Joint Conference on Future Information and Communication Technologies     

Mapping forest vegetation using Landsat TM imagery and a canopy reflectance model

Estimates of mean tree size and cover for each forest stand from an invertible forest canopy reflectance model are part of a new forest vegetation mapping system. Image segmentation defines stands which are sorted into general growth forms using per-pixel image classifications. Ecological models based on terrain relations predict species associations for the conifer, hardwood, and brush growth forms. The combination of the model-based estimates of tree size and cover with species associations yields general-purpose vegetation maps useful for a variety of land management needs. Results of timber inventories in the Tahoe and Stanislaus National Forests indicate the vegetation maps form a useful basis for stratification. Patterns in timber volumes for the strata reveal that the cover estimates are more reliable than the tree size estimates. A map accuracy assessment of the Stanislaus National Forest shows high overall map accuracy and also illustrates the problems in estimating tree size.     

Guided restarting local search for production planning

Planning problems can be solved with a large variety of different approaches, and a significant amount of work has been devoted to the automation of planning processes using different kinds of methods. This paper focuses on the use of specific local search algorithms for real-world production planning based on experiments with real-world data, and presents an adapted local search guided by evolutionary metaheuristics. To make algorithms efficient, many specifics need to be considered and included in the problem solving. We demonstrate that the use of specialized local searches can significantly improve the convergence and efficiency of the algorithm. The paper also includes an experimental study of the efficiency of two memetic algorithms, and presents a real-world software implementation for the production planning.     

The study of perceived adverse effects of digital piracy and involvement: insights from adult computer users

In this study, we focus on two sets of expected negative consequences of engaging in digital piracy among the seldom studied adult computer users rather than student population. We delve into the role of perceived risk and moral intensity as drivers of consumers’ attitudes and behavioural intentions, and explore the rarely examined moderating effect of issue involvement on the relationship between the attitude and intention to pirate. The dominant attitude–behaviour theory is extended with an ethical decision-making theoretical perspective. The hypotheses are tested via mail survey data from a random sample of adult consumers using structural equations modelling. The results of this cross-sectional study show unfailing support for the relationships proposed in our model. Our findings suggest that, in addition to perceived risk, moral intensity (i.e. the expected consequences for others), has a particularly strong total effect on the intention to pirate, and that consumer involvement in illegally downloading files is a salient factor moderating the relationship between attitudes and behavioural intentions. Based on this pattern of results, we offer theoretical and practical implications.     

A Fixed-Parameter Approach to 2-Layer Planarization

A bipartite graph is biplanar if the vertices can be placed on two parallel lines (layers) in the plane such that there are no edge crossings when edges are drawn as line segments between the layers. In this paper we study the 2-Layer Planarization problem: Can k edges be deleted from a given graph G so that the remaining graph is biplanar? This problem is NP-complete, and remains so if the permutation of the vertices in one layer is fixed (the 1-Layer Planarization problem). We prove that these problems are fixed-parameter tractable by giving linear-time algorithms for their solution (for fixed k). In particular, we solve the 2-Layer Planarization problem in O(k · 6^k + |G|) time and the 1-Layer Planarization problem in O(3^k · |G|) time. We also show that there are polynomial-time constant-approximation algorithms for both problems.