Demonstration of a tool for automatic learning and re-use of knowledge in the activated sludge process.

Wastewater treatment plant operators encounter complex operational problems related to the activated sludge process and usually respond to these by applying their own intuition and by taking advantage of what they have learnt from past experiences of similar problems. However, previous process experiences are not easy to integrate in numerical control, and new tools must be developed to enable re-use of plant operating experience. The aim of this paper is to investigate the usefulness of a case-based reasoning (CBR) approach to apply learning and re-use of knowledge gained during past incidents to confront actual complex problems through the IWA/COST Benchmark protocol. A case study shows that the proposed CBR system achieves a significant improvement of the benchmark plant performance when facing a high-flow event disturbance.     

Alumina-supported catalysts for propane oxidative dehydrogenation from mixed VXM(6−X)O19 (M=W, Mo) hexametalate precursors

γ-Al₂O₃ supported vanadium oxides were modified by tungsten and molybdenum oxides in order to improve dispersion and selectivity towards olefins in propane oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH). Both vanadium–tungsten and vanadium–molybdenum catalysts were obtained by adsorption of mixed isopolyanions (VW₅O₁₉⁵⁻, V₂W₄O₁₉⁴⁻, VMo₅O₁₉⁵⁻ and V₂Mo₄O₁₉⁴⁻) from aqueous solutions. The isopolyanion solutions were characterized by UV-Vis and ⁵¹V NMR spectroscopy. Vanadium, vanadium–tungsten and vanadium–molybdenum precursors and catalysts were also characterized by UV-Vis (diffuse reflectance) and solid state ⁵¹V NMR spectroscopy. An improved selectivity to propene in the presence of tungsten and molybdenum in VO_x/γ-Al₂O₃ was observed and attributed to dilution of vanadium by tungsten or molybdenum oxides on the γ-Al₂O₃ surface.     

Use of citric acid for heavy metals extraction from contaminated sewage sludge for land application.

Recent studies revealed that organic acids such as citric and oxalic acids seemed to be more promising as chemical extracting agents for removal of heavy metals from contaminated sludge, since they are biodegradable and can attain a higher metal extraction efficiency at mildly acidic pH compared to other extracting agents. Results of a lab-scale study on the efficiency of citric acid in the extraction of chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), nickel (Ni) and zinc (Zn) from anaerobically digested sludge, revealed that citric acid seemed to be highly effective in extracting Cr (at 100%), Cu (at 88%), Ni (at 98%) and Zn (at 100%) at pH 2.33, mostly at 5 days leaching time except for Cu and Zn, which are at 1 day and 2 h contact times respectively. Lead removal at the same pH was also high at 95% but at a longer leaching time of 11 days. At pH 3, citric acid seemed to be highly effective in extracting Pb (at 100%) at 1 day leaching time, although higher removals were also attained for Ni (70%) and Zn (80%) at only 2 h leaching time. Chemical speciation studies showed that Cr, Cu and Ni in the sludge sample seem to predominate in residual fractions, while Pb and Zn were found mostly bound to organic and inorganic matter forms, hence the potential of the sludge for land application.     

Implementation of RNS-Based Distributed Arithmetic Discrete Wavelet Transform Architectures Using Field-Programmable Logic

Currently there are design barriers inhibiting the implementation of high-precision digital signal processing (DSP) objects with field programmable logic (FPL) devices. This paper explores overcoming these barriers by fusing together the popular distributed arithmetic (DA) method with the residue number system (RNS) for use in FPL-centric designs. The new design paradigm is studied in the context of a high-performance filter bank and a discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The proposed design paradigm is facilitated by a new RNS accumulator structure based on a carry save adder (CSA). The reported methodology also introduces a polyphase filter structure that results in a reduced look-up table (LUT) budget. The 2C-DA and RNS-DA are compared, in the context of a FPL implementation strategy, using a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) filter bank as a common design theme. The results show that the RNS-DA, compared to a traditional 2C-DA design, enjoys a performance advantage that increases with precision (wordlength).     

Evaluating the impact of CASE: an empirical comparison of retrospective and cross-sectional survey approaches

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two methods of assessing the productivity and quality impact of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) and Fourth Generation Language (4GL) technologies: (1) by the retrospective method; and (2) the cross-sectional method. Both methods involve the use of questionnaire surveys. Developers' perceptions depend on the context in which they are expressed and this includes expectations about the effectiveness of a given software product. Consequently, it is generally not reliable to base inferences about the relative merits of CASE and 4GLs on a cross-sectional comparison of two separate samples of users. The retrospective method that requires each respondent to directly compare different products is shown to be more reliable. However, there may be scope to employ cross-sectional comparisons of the findings from different samples where both sets of respondents use the same reference point for their judgements, and where numerical rather than verbal rating scales are used to measure perceptions.