Pesticide adsorption in relation to soil properties and soil type distribution in regional scale

Study was focused on the evaluation of pesticide adsorption in soils, as one of the parameters, which are necessary to know when assessing possible groundwater contamination caused by pesticides commonly used in agriculture. Batch sorption tests were performed for 11 selected pesticides and 13 representative soils. The Freundlich equations were used to describe adsorption isotherms. Multiple-linear regressions were used to predict the Freundlich adsorption coefficients from measured soil properties. Resulting functions and a soil map of the Czech Republic were used to generate maps of the coefficient distribution. The multiple linear regressions showed that the K(F) coefficient depended on: (a) combination of OM (organic matter content), pH(KCl) and CEC (cation exchange capacity), or OM, SCS (sorption complex saturation) and salinity (terbuthylazine), (b) combination of OM and pH(KCl), or OM, SCS and salinity (prometryne), (c) combination of OM and pH(KCl), or OM and ρ(z) (metribuzin), (d) combination of OM, CEC and clay content, or clay content, CEC and salinity (hexazinone), (e) combination of OM and pH(KCl), or OM and SCS (metolachlor), (f) OM or combination of OM and CaCO(3) (chlorotoluron), (g) OM (azoxystrobin), (h) combination of OM and pH(KCl) (trifluralin), (i) combination of OM and clay content (fipronil), (j) combination of OM and pH(KCl), or OM, pH(KCl) and CaCO(3) (thiacloprid), (k) combination of OM, pH(KCl) and CEC, or sand content, pH(KCl) and salinity (chlormequat chloride).     

System Condition Estimation Based on Selected Tribodiagnostic Data

The aim of the paper is to estimate a system‐soft failure occurrence and residual technical life. When estimating a residual technical life statistically, usually a big amount of tribodiagnostic data is used. Data include the information about particles contained in oil that testifies to oil and system conditions. We focus here on the particles that we consider to be interesting. They are ferrum (Fe) and lead (Pb) as contact degradation product. By modelling the occurrence of particles in oil, we expect to determine the expected moment for soft failure occurrence or adequate moment to perform preventive maintenance. The way of our modelling is based on the specific characteristics of diffusion processes, namely the Wiener process with positive drift and Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. Following the modelling results, we could judge hazard rate and set‐up principles of ‘CBM ‐ Condition Based Maintenance’ (CBM). However, the possibilities are much wider, because we can also plan operation, mission and reduce life cost. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Logistic model-based tool for policy-making towards sustainable waste management

The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel approach which supports facility planning in the field of waste management. Only 23 % of municipal solid waste (MSW) was thermally treated in the EU 27 in 2011. The increased exploitation of its potential for energy recovery must be accompanied by massive investments into highly efficient and reliable incineration technologies. Therefore, the challenge is to be efficient and use the technology to its optimal level. Feasibility studies of all plants providing a service for a region create a large and complex task. Gate fee (the charge for waste processing in the facility) represents one of the most crucial input parameters for the assessment. The gate fee is driven by configuration of the technology, competition, market development, environmental taxation and costs of waste transport to satisfy the plant’s capacity. Valid prediction of the gate fee thus presents a demanding task. In this paper, first, an advanced tool called NERUDA is introduced, which addresses logistic optimization and capacity sizing. The key idea is to focus on the problem of competition modelling among waste-to-energy plants, landfill sites, and mechanical–biological treatment plants producing refuse-derived fuel. Then, the main theoretical concepts are discussed, followed by the development of a suitable mathematical model. The goal is to obtain a minimized cost of MSW treatment for waste producers (municipalities). The application of the developed tool is demonstrated through a case study, where uncertain parameters entering the calculation are handled by a repetitive Monte Carlo simulation based on real-world data.     

Using XBDDs and ZBDDs in points‐to analysis

Binary decision diagrams (BDDs) have recently become widely accepted as a space‐efficient method of representing relations in points‐to or reference analyses. When BDDs are used to represent relations, each element of a domain is assigned a bit pattern to represent it, but not every bit pattern represents an element. The circuit design, model checking, and verification communities have achieved significant reductions in BDD sizes using several techniques to reduce the overhead of these don't‐care bit patterns. We adapt these techniques to BDD‐based program analysis, and we study their effect on the BDD size in this context. Specifically, we compare the effectiveness of Coudert and Madre's restrict operation and the use of zero‐suppressed BDDs (ZBDDs) to represent relations. Using don't‐care BDDs (XBDDs) and ZBDDs to reduce the size of the relations allows a compiler or other software analysis tools to analyze larger programs with greater precision. Our experimental evaluation considers both context‐insensitive and context‐sensitive program analyses. We also provide a metric that can be used to estimate whether ZBDDs will be more compact than BDDs for a given analysis. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Compositional entailment checking for a fragment of separation logic

We present a decision procedure for checking entailment between separation logic formulas with inductive predicates specifying complex data structures corresponding to finite nesting of various kinds of singly linked lists: acyclic or cyclic, nested lists, skip lists, etc. The decision procedure is compositional in the sense that it reduces the problem of checking entailment between two arbitrary formulas to the problem of checking entailment between a formula and an atom. Subsequently, in case the atom is a predicate, we reduce the entailment to testing membership of a tree derived from the formula in the language of a tree automaton derived from the predicate. The procedure is later also extended to doubly linked lists. We implemented this decision procedure and tested it successfully on verification conditions obtained from programs using both singly and doubly linked nested lists as well as skip lists.     

A method for reduction of examples in relational learning

Feature selection methods often improve the performance of attribute-value learning. We explore whether also in relational learning, examples in the form of clauses can be reduced in size to speed up learning without affecting the learned hypothesis. To this end, we introduce the notion of safe reduction: a safely reduced example cannot be distinguished from the original example under the given hypothesis language bias. Next, we consider the particular, rather permissive bias of bounded treewidth clauses. We show that under this hypothesis bias, examples of arbitrary treewidth can be reduced efficiently. We evaluate our approach on four data sets with the popular system Aleph and the state-of-the-art relational learner nFOIL. On all four data sets we make learning faster in the case of nFOIL, achieving an order-of-magnitude speed up on one of the data sets, and more accurate in the case of Aleph.     

Convective diffusion from strip-like micro-probes into colloidal suspensions

Full equations of convective diffusion are solved numerically for a strip-like (2D) electrodiffusion friction probe in a stream of microdisperse liquid, assuming a non-linear near-to-wall velocity profile ranging from simple shear flow (p = 1) to ideal slip (p = 0). The range of generalized Peclet number H from H = 0.01 (almost pure spatial diffusion) to H = 100 (diffusion layer with negligible longitudinal diffusion) covers all cases of possible experimental relevance. The main result is expressed as a relative deviation of actual total diffusion flux N from its diffusion-layer approximation N_DLA, Ψ = N/N_DLA ? 1.     

Morphology‐Dependent Magnetism in Nanographene: Beyond Nanoribbons

Imprinting self‐sustainable magnetic features into graphene has recently generated much interest owing to its potential application in spintronics. Several strategies for imprinting magnetic features into graphene are proposed theoretically. However, only a few of them are realized experimentally. Here, the first scalable synthesis of magnetic graphene nanoplatelets with diverse morphologies, including nanoribbons and triangular, pentagonal, hexagonal, and other polyhedral shapes, is reported. This material enters the ferromagnetic regime at a temperature of ≈37 K with magnetization approaching ≈0.45 emu g^?1 under high external magnetic fields. Theoretical calculations are used to explain this sort of morphology‐driven magnetism of graphene nanoplatelets, which emerges from the synergistic effects of the size, geometry of nanographenes, edge terminations, and angle between adjacent edges. In addition, they suggest a new way for preparing magnetically ordered graphene nanoplatelets with a higher transition temperature. In this respect, triangular motifs with zigzag edges represent the most promising morphology of graphene nanoplatelets, which can remain magnetically ordered up to ≈107 K. Based on these challenging results, further tuning of the size and morphology in spatially confined nanographenes combined with doping and sp³ functionalization will enable the preparation of magnetically ordered half‐metallic carbon sustainable up to room temperature, thus opening new opportunities in spintronics.     

In-situ observation of crack propagation in thermally sprayed coatings

In-situ observation of thermally sprayed coating fractures may complement classical fractographic analysis to study specific failure mechanisms. In this paper, fracture of free-standing plasma sprayed ceramic (alumina) and metallic (stainless steel 316L) coatings during 3-point bending (3PB) was observed in-situ using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) in order to identify the most important failure mechanisms. Observations were supplemented by fractographic analysis of fractured specimens.