Artificial ponds in a Mediterranean region (Andalusia,southern Spain): agricultural and environmental issues

A total of 16 543 artificial ponds were inventoried. Ninety‐one per cent of the ponds were classified as for farming use. Generally, the fraction of farm land converted to pond structures was close to that predicted from the average annual precipitation in the region. However, in several areas, this fraction was remarkably higher than the value predicted, probably due to excessive groundwater extraction. Overall, the naturalisation stage of ponds was poor. However, ponds sited on natural substrate basins had more structured‐marginal vegetation, compared with ponds of artificial substrate basins. Furthermore, other factors related to pond management might seriously limit their naturalisation stage. Despite the high abundance of ponds in Andalusia, our results suggest that, in order to improve the potential for biodiversity conservation in these environments, substantial structural and management changes are required.     

A new approach for three-phase loads compensation based on the instantaneous reactive power theory

The original instantaneous reactive power theory or p–q theory has been systematically used in the control of active power filters (APFs). When the APF is connected in parallel to a non-linear and unbalanced load, the p–q theory application has allowed a compensation strategy named constant power to be obtained. This means that, after the APF connection, the instantaneous power supplied by the source is constant and it has the same value as the average power consumed by the load. Nevertheless, the use of other compensation strategies is possible: unity power factor or sinusoidal and balanced supply currents, among others. This paper shows that any compensation strategy may be developed into the p–q theory frame. Besides, the paper presents a p–q theory reformulation without using mapping matrices, which makes easier the obtention of the compensation currents. Finally, an exhaustive analysis of practical cases has been carried out at simulation and experimental level through a laboratory prototype which has allowed the proposed approach to be verified.     

Catalytic and photocatalytic ozonation of phenol on MnO2 supported catalysts

Different series of manganese-supported catalysts containing 10 wt.% of manganese, as oxide, on TiO₂ have been prepared by the sol–gel method and by the traditional method based on the impregnation of the support with the metal precursor on commercial and sol–gel supports. The samples were characterized by measuring the specific area (S_BET), temperature-programmed desorption (TPD), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, temperature-programmed reduction (TPR), electrophoretic migration (IP) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The catalytic and photocatalytic activity was measured in a batch reactor using ozone as the oxidizing agent. The catalytic behavior, expressed as constant rate, in absence of irradiation did not show significant changes for the manganese-supported catalysts. The only exception was the cogelated Mn/TiO₂ catalyst, which showed higher degradation activity, the main product being benzoquinone. On the other hand, all the irradiated systems showed an increase in the phenol degradation, being CO₂ and small organic acids the final product.     

Fast and Scalable Mesh Superfacets

In the field of computer vision, the introduction of a low‐level preprocessing step to oversegment images into superpixels – relatively small regions whose boundaries agree with those of the semantic entities in the scene – has enabled advances in segmentation by reducing the number of elements to be labeled from hundreds of thousands, or millions, to a just few hundred. While some recent works in mesh processing have used an analogous oversegmentation, they were not intended to be general and have relied on graph cut techniques that do not scale to current mesh sizes. Here, we present an iterative superfacet algorithm and introduce adaptations of undersegmentation error and compactness, which are well‐motivated and principled metrics from the vision community. We demonstrate that our approach produces results comparable to those of the normalized cuts algorithm when evaluated on the Princeton Segmentation Benchmark, while requiring orders of magnitude less time and memory and easily scaling to, and enabling the processing of, much larger meshes.