Evaluation of wind energy investment interest and electricity generation cost analysis for Turkey

Turkey has remarkable wind energy potential, but its utilisation rate is very low. However, in 2007, energy investors applied to the Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) with 751 wind projects to obtain a 78180.2 MW wind power plant license. This paper first presents an overview of wind energy development in the world and then reviews related situations in Turkey. Second, to motivate the interest in wind energy investment, new wind power plant license applications in Turkey are analysed. Finally, wind electricity generation cost analyses were performed at 14 locations in Turkey. Capacity factors of investigated locations were calculated between 19.7% and 56.8%, and the production cost of electrical energy was between 1.73 and 4.99 $cent/kW h for two different wind shear coefficients.     

Use of Fenton oxidation to improve the biodegradability of a pharmaceutical wastewater

The applicability of Fenton's oxidation to improve the biodegradability of a pharmaceutical wastewater to be treated biologically was investigated. The wastewater was originated from a factory producing a variety of pharmaceutical chemicals. Treatability studies were conducted under laboratory conditions with all chemicals (having COD varying from 900 to 7000 mg/L) produced in the factory in order to determine the operational conditions to utilize in the full-scale treatment plant. Optimum pH was determined as 3.5 and 7.0 for the first (oxidation) and second stage (coagulation) of the Fenton process, respectively. For all chemicals, COD removal efficiency was highest when the molar ratio of H(2)O(2)/Fe(2+) was 150-250. At H(2)O(2)/Fe(2+) ratio of 155, 0.3M H(2)O(2) and 0.002 M Fe(2+), provided 45-65% COD removal. The wastewater treatment plant that employs Fenton oxidation followed by aerobic degradation in sequencing batch reactors (SBR), built after these treatability studies provided an overall COD removal efficiency of 98%, and compliance with the discharge limits. The efficiency of the Fenton's oxidation was around 45-50% and the efficiency in the SBR system which has two reactors each having a volume of 8m(3) and operated with a total cycle time of 1 day, was around 98%, regarding the COD removal.     

Convergence theorems by a new iteration process for a finite family of nonself asymptotically nonexpansive mappings with errors in Banach spaces

In this paper, we study a new iteration process for a finite family of nonself asymptotically nonexpansive mappings with errors in Banach spaces. We prove some weak and strong convergence theorems for this new iteration process. The results of this paper improve and extend the corresponding results of Chidume et al. (2003) [10], Osilike and Aniagbosor (2000) [3], Schu (1991) [4], Takahashi and Kim (1998) [9], Tian et al. (2007) [18], Wang (2006) [11], Yang (2007) [17] and others.     

Evaluation of confidence limit estimates of cluster analysis on molecular marker data

BACKGROUND: Diversity studies employ cluster analysis as a statistical tool, whereby relationships between individuals are shown in a dendrogram, mostly accompanied by bootstrap support for merging branches to indicate confidence limits. The objective of this study was to evaluate the reliability of the currently applied method of obtaining confidence limit estimates in cluster analysis and to propose an improved alternative bootstrap method. RESULTS: It was illustrated via a simulation study that conventional bootstrap support for cluster analysis was affected by the sample size. The reliability of merging branches decreased with increasing number of individuals in the sample. Unlike the current bootstrap support for cluster analysis, the proposed method provides confidence intervals for the similarity coefficients between individuals. To facilitate the interpretation of similarity coefficients and confidence intervals, alternative graphical presentations are proposed for both ‘similarity coefficients’ and ‘confidence interval range’. CONCLUSION: The proposed bootstrap method is not affected by the number of individuals in the sample. Copyright © 2011 Society of Chemical Industry     

Investigation of wind shear coefficients and their effect on electrical energy generation

Wind measurements are generally performed below wind turbine hub heights due to higher measurement and tower costs. In order to obtain the wind speed at the hub height of the turbine, the measurements are extrapolated, assuming that the wind shear is constant. This assumption may result in some critical errors between the estimated and actual energy outputs. In this paper wind data collected in Bal?kesir from October 2008 to September 2009, has been used to show the effects of wind shear coefficient on energy production. Results of the study showed that, the difference between wind energy production using extrapolated wind data and energy production using measured wind data at hub height may be up to 49.6%.     

Reliability of Steel Truss Roof Systems Under Variable Snow Load Profiles

The probabilistic safety analysis of steel truss roof systems under variable snow load profiles is investigated. The roofs of structures such as industrial buildings or sports halls, which require wide areas, are frequently subjected to unexpectedly high loads. Therefore, compared to the residential buildings, that type of buildings often comes across failure or prohibition of usage. Probabilistic techniques are utilized for the analysis of the problem. Thirty-six steel roof structures with different structural dimensions and load variations are modelled and their failure probabilities are calculated. In this paper, a complicated stochastic analysis is reduced to the solution of a load–resistance (S–R) problem by utilizing sensitivity analyses. Firstly, the structures were designed through structural analyses, and then the sensitivity analyses were conducted to understand the response of the structure to the load and to the span-length parameters. In this paper, a reliability study which gradually monitors the effect of geometrical parameters on the failure trend is presented. Three different snow load distribution functions were used. The relation between failure, and load or structural dimension variations was investigated. The results obtained in this study are discussed and compared with the results from the literature for similar structures subjected to snow loads. It is observed that for the snow load distributions with high standard deviations the structural reliability indices may give results below the target safety levels of the design codes. Finally, the assessment of the results shows that the effect of the standard deviation of the snow load on failure probability is much more than the effect of intensity of the nominal snow load.     

Monitoring Smartphones for Anomaly Detection

In this paper we demonstrate how to monitor a smartphone running Symbian operating system and Windows Mobile in order to extract features for anomaly detection. These features are sent to a remote server because running a complex intrusion detection system on this kind of mobile device still is not feasible due to capability and hardware limitations. We give examples on how to compute relevant features and introduce the top ten applications used by mobile phone users based on a study in 2005. The usage of these applications is recorded by a monitoring client and visualized. Additionally, monitoring results of public and self-written malwares are shown. For improving monitoring client performance, Principal Component Analysis was applied which lead to a decrease of about 80% of the amount of monitored features.     

High power universal piezoelectric transformer.

This study describes a multilayer piezoelectric voltage and power transformer that has one direction poling, operates in a wide-frequency range and delivers both step-up and step-down voltages by inverting the electrical connections. In this design, the input and output electrodes are on the same side of the disk and are isolated from each other by a fixed isolation gap. The electrode pattern is a ring/dot structure such that it uses radial mode for both input and output part that are built-in on the same ceramic disk. A prototype transformer was fabricated of size 15 x 2.78 mm2 having mass of 3.8 gm. In the step-down configuration at the constant output power of 6 W, the transformer characteristics across a 100 ohms load were found to be efficiency = 92%, gain = 0.21 input voltage = 110 Vrms, and temperature rise = 20 degrees C from the room temperature. In the step-up configuration at the constant output power of 5 W, the transformer characteristics across a 5 kohms load were found to be efficiency = 97%, gain = 9.5, input voltage = 16 Vrms, and temperature rise = 8 degrees C from the room temperature. A detailed equivalent circuit analysis of the transformer was done, and the results were found to be in excellent agreement with the experimental results.     

Predicting RC Frame Response to Excavation-Induced Settlement

In many tunneling and excavation projects, free-field vertical ground movements have been used to predict subsidence, and empirical limits have been employed to evaluate risk. Validity of such approaches is largely unknown given that ground movements are in fact not one-dimensional and that adjacent applied loads are known to have an impact. This paper employed analytical and large-scale experimental efforts to quantify these issues, in the case of excavation adjacent to a reinforced concrete frame with tieback anchors and a sheetpile wall in dry sand. With this flexible system, a disproportionate amount of the soil and building movements occurred prior to installation of the first tieback, even when conservative construction practices were applied. Furthermore, free-field data generated a trough as little as one-half the size of that recorded near the building frames. Empirically based relative gradient limits generally matched the extent and distribution of the damage, while the application of various structural limits did not fully identify local damage distribution but did generally reflect global response. The use of fully free-field data or a failure to include lateral soil displacements both underpredicted building displacements by as much as 50% for low-rise concrete frames without grade beams on sand.