Environmental flow assessment for energy generation sustainability employing different hydraulic evaluation methods: Çambaşi hydropower plant case study in Turkey

The operating principle of hydroelectric power plants (HPP) is based on utilizing the potential energy of water, which constitutes the basic component of the plant. In other words, water is crucially important in energy production in hydroelectric power plants. The importance of water is not only limited to the energy production, but also can affect directly or indirectly all living things in the water basin. This study deals with the methods of determining the environmental flow, which will not damage the integrity of the rivers and the ecosystem in HPPs, together with enabling the sustainable electricity production as an indirect result. Suggestions are made for determining the environmental flow for Çambas? regulator and Hydropower plant, a run-of-river type power plant in Turkey, after reviewing commonly used methods all over the world. Tennant, Tessmann, and flow duration curve methods were used in determining the environmental flow. Separate calculations were carried out for Cambas? and Ogene regulators, which constitute the hydropower plant. The calculated values were compared with the normal (regime) flow rates and project flow values. As a result, Tessmann method, one of the hydrological based environmental flow determination methods, and good category of Tennant method, 20 % of annual average flow in dry period and 40 % of annual average flow in wet period, are proposed for Çamba?? HPP.     

Reverse Engineering of Mobile Banking Applications

Software reverse engineering is the process of analyzing a software system to extract the design and implementation details. Reverse engineering provides the source code of an application, the insight view of the architecture and the third-party dependencies. From a security perspective, it is mostly used for finding vulnerabilities and attacking or cracking an application. The process is carried out either by obtaining the code in plaintext or reading it through the binaries or mnemonics. Nowadays, reverse engineering is widely used for mobile applications and is considered a security risk. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), a leading security research forum, has included reverse engineering in its top 10 list of mobile application vulnerabilities. Mobile applications are used in many sectors, e.g., banking, education, health. In particular, the banking applications are critical in terms of security as they are used for financial transactions. A security breach of such applications can result in huge financial losses for the customers as well as the banks. There exist various tools for reverse engineering of mobile applications, however, they have deficiencies, e.g., complex configurations, lack of detailed analysis reports. In this research work, we perform an analysis of the available tools for reverse engineering of mobile applications. Our dataset consists of the mobile banking applications of the banks providing services in Pakistan. Our results indicate that none of the existing tools can carry out the complete reverse engineering process as a standalone tool. In addition, we observe significant differences in terms of the execution time and the number of files generated by each tool for the same file.     

Zearalenone removal in synthetic media and aqueous part of canned corn by montmorillonite K10 and pillared montmorillonite K10

The capacities of montmorillonite K10 (K10), aluminum pillared K10 (Al-K10), and iron pillared K10 (Fe-K10) to eliminate zearalenone (ZEN) from synthetic media and the aqueous part of canned corn were studied. Original clay and pillared clays were characterized in terms of X-ray powder diffraction analysis and N(2) adsorption-desorption isotherms. The maximum amounts of adsorption of ZEN by K10, Al-K10, and Fe-K10 at 25°C and pH 7 were 0.202, 1.305, and 1.028 mg/g and 0.264, 0.096, and 0.255 mg/g, calculated from Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms, respectively. The adsorption of ZEN was also studied as a function of adsorbent amount (1 to 30 mg), ZEN concentration (2 to 20 mg/liter), pH of solution (pH 4 to 10), and contact time. Pillared clays could be an excellent alternative for removing ZEN in contaminated food samples and are potentially low-cost adsorbents with a promising future as an alternative to more costly materials.     

An Overview of Computer-aided Molecular and Process Design

Identifying sustainable chemical processes often depends on the choice of enabling materials that directly influence the overall performance. Matching property targets while incorporating adequate process knowledge is essential for optimal material selection. Multi-scale decisions need to be taken simultaneously to determine the optimal process configurations, operating conditions, and material structures. Integrating molecular to process scale decisions within an equation-oriented optimization framework leads to large-scale mixed-integer nonlinear programs (MINLP). Over the years, several solution approaches have been suggested to tackle this issue. Here, the current state-of-the-art in the field of computer-aided molecular and process design (CAMPD) is discussed and key challenges and open questions are highlighted that may stimulate future research.