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Optimizing diesel engine performance and emissions with mahua biodiesel blends using taguchi methodology
Get PDFThis study investigates how adjusting operational parameters influences the performance and emission characteristics of a diesel engine operating on a blend of traditional diesel fuel and mahua biodiesel. The biodiesel was obtained using the transesterification method, and fuel blends were formulated with diesel proportions ranging from 80% to 100% and biodiesel content from 0% to 20%. Key engine parameters such as engine load (20 –100%), mahua biodiesel blend (0 –20%), and
engine speed (1300 –1450rpm) were varied systematically during the experiments, while the compression ratio was held constant at 18:1. The aim was to determine the most effective combination of settings to enhance combustion efficiency and reduce harmful exhaust emissions. The findings demonstrated a modest yet meaningful improvement in engine efficiency, with gains of approximately 2–3%. While seemingly
incremental, this enhancement becomes significant when coupled with concurrent reductions in harmful emissions, aligning with global efforts to transition toward sustainable fuel alternatives. The optimized biodiesel blends not only improved fuel utilization but also advanced environmental objectives by mitigating pollutant emissions, underscoring their dual role in enhancing performance and ecological sustainability. The outcomes of this study support the potential of mahua biodiesel as a viable and
eco-friendly supplement to petroleum diesel. Overall, the results contribute meaningful data toward improving diesel engine performance while reducing environmental pollution
Back to the future? Reflections from 25 years of empirical research on Leaving Certificate assessment in Ireland
No full textPost-primary students in Ireland are awarded the Leaving Certificate after passing the required assessments that occur in the final year of senior cycle education. While planned changes have introduced incremental adjustments as to how assessment in this state-certified qualification is undertaken, recent unplanned events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated discussions on future reforms. As we arrive at the centenary of the Leaving Certificate’s foundation, it seems timely to review the empirical research that has been conducted on the assessment approaches that it currently uses. Taking the publication of the Commission on the Points System in 1999 as a starting point and using Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) six-step approach for scoping reviews, 107 publications up to 2024 were included in this study.
Analysis and synthesis of the studies resulted in five broad research topics: Curriculum Development and Assessment Reform, Maths and Science Education, Fairness, Transition to Higher Education, and Emergency Measures. The results of this study highlight past research and policy priorities as well as gaps within the existing literature. It is hoped that the freely available database arising from this study will help to inform future research and policy agendas pertaining to Leaving
Certificate assessment
Students Learning With Communities Programme Evaluation
Get PDFThis report outlines findings from a qualitative evaluation of the Students Learning with Communities (SLWC) programme at Technological University (TU) Dublin, undertaken by the evaluation, quality and inspection (EQI) research team at Dublin City University (DCU) in Spring 2024.
The evaluation team were tasked with answering the following research questions:
● What facilitates and hinders responsiveness with regard to the university’s engagement with communities?
● What lessons can TU Dublin use to develop new supports for community engaged research outside the curriculum, seeking to sustain best practices and build on what worked well, to develop new, more effective supports?
● What challenges and enablers did participants encounter in programme delivery?
Data gathered from focus groups and one-to-one interviews held with key stakeholders who had direct involvement with the SLWC programme team revealed numerous enablers to successful programme delivery, including:
● support with administrative and logistical tasks,
● staff/student recognition and awards,
● effective establishment of projects,
● facilitation of connections and collaborations, and
● practical workshops and training.
Having acknowledged these successes and their desire for the project to be strengthened in the future, the participants in the research were keen to identify specific areas that should be addressed to increase the project’s effectiveness. This included elements such as ongoing communication and engagement between key stakeholders after projects had been established, timing and scheduling issues, resource constraints, continuity and sustainability of the programme, and continued recognition and visibility of programme successes. It is evident that these key areas need to be addressed to sustain and strengthen the structures allowing for successful delivery of future impactful, collaborative projects.
The EQI team provided a set of robust recommendations across six key areas, namely:
1. Enhancing communication and promotion of the programme.
2. Ensuring appropriate resource allocation and support.
3. Embedding inclusivity and accessibility.
4. Enhancing experiential learning and student development.
5. Ensuring integration and formalisation of the programme.
6. Highlighting the significance of evaluation
Does school inspection lead to school improvement? A case study
Get PDFThis study examines the role of school inspections in driving improvement within an initially low-performing secondary school in Ireland over a 15-year period. Through a longitudinal case study, the research investigates the impact of three inspection cycles on school development. The study draws on a thematic review of literature to contextualise the evolving functions, roles, and frameworks of the Irish Inspectorate from 1996 to the present, a period marked by significant changes in inspection practices. Nineteen semi-structured interviews with stakeholders provide qualitative insights, which are analysed alongside the literature to understand the dynamics at play in the school's improvement journey. Findings suggest that despite Ireland's low-stakes inspection system, strong trust in the expertise of inspectors, the respected position of the inspectorate, and alignment between the inspection findings and the school's internal self-evaluation were instrumental in fostering acceptance of the initial critical report. This acceptance by school leadership, extended gradually to the entire school, underscores inspection as a potent catalyst for sustainable school improvement. The study concludes that, under specific conditions, school inspection can indeed serve as a highly effective mechanism for long-term educational improvement
Delay-Reliability Aware Optimal Downlink Scheduling for Extended Reality Applications in 6G
Get PDFExtended Reality (XR) stands at the forefront of enabling the Metaverse, promising transformative advancements in human-machine and interpersonal interactions. Achieving seamless XR experiences, however, requires the capabilities of 6G networks, as current 5G solutions fall short of addressing XR’s dual demands for enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). Bridging this gap calls for innovative scheduling frameworks tailored to XR’s
stringent requirements. This paper introduces a delay-reliabilityaware optimal downlink scheduling framework for XR services in 6G networks. The proposed approach integrates a novel delay tracking mechanism to optimize the scheduling process, ensuring that a maximum number of XR users meet stringent delay and reliability criteria. Simulation results demonstrate substantial performance gains, with the proposed framework significantly outperforming conventional scheduling techniques, making it a compelling 6G scheduling solution for XR application
Herding unmasked: Insights into cryptocurrencies, stocks and US ETFs
Get PDFHerding behavior has become a familiar phenomenon to investors, with potential dangers of both undervaluing and overvaluing assets, while also threatening market stability. This study contributes to the literature on herding behavior by using a recent dataset, covering the most impactful events of recent years. To our knowledge, this is the first study examining
herding behavior across three different types of investment vehicle and also the first study observing herding at a community (subset) level. Specifically, we first explore this phenomenon in each separate type of investment vehicle, namely stocks, US ETFs and cryptocurrencies, using the Cross-Sectional Absolute Deviation model. We find mostly similar herding patterns for stocks and US ETFs. Subsequently, the same experiment is implemented on a combination of all three investment vehicles. For a deeper investigation, we adopt graph-based techniques including the Minimum Spanning Tree and Louvain community detection
to partition the combination into smaller subsets to detect herding behavior for each subset. We find that herding behavior exists at all times across all types of investment vehicle at a subset level, although perhaps not at the superset level, and that this herding behavior tends to stem from specific events that solely impact that subset of assets. Lastly, we explore herding by examining the financial contagion effects between these types of investment vehicle. Results show that US ETFs not only have a tendency to propagate similar trading behaviors in stocks and especially cryptocurrencies but also show self-reinforcing herding behavior, acting as drivers of their own trends
#SeAcabó: how a mass-mediated “social drama” made visible and confronted (subjective and objective) violence in women’s football in Spain
Get PDFThe victory of the Spanish national women’s football team at the
2023 FIFA World Cup was marred by the mass-mediated non-consensual kiss on midfielder, Jennifer Hermoso, by Luis Rubiales, then
President of the Royal Spanish Football National Federation. The
kiss sparked general outrage worldwide and led to the prosecution
of Rubiales for sexual assault and coercion. Drawing on the concepts of “moral shock” and “social drama,” this article explores how
this widely disseminated episode of “subjective violence” resulted
in a shock capable of mobilising and politicising different agents. It
does so through qualitative analysis of official statements and
vernacular online discussions. The article makes the case that the
unfolding of this social drama enabled more subtle (objective)
violence, long endured by female athletes, to be brought into
public discourse debate. In so doing, it boosted demands for social
change. But such demands were also contested, in that the structured social drama resulted in an online “reactionary moral shock”
characterised by anti-feminist and misogynistic discourses.
Significantly, our analysis of these discourses reveals a shift in
male victimisation narratives and strategies to disempower
women and maintain sexual inequality. These include the denial
of gender-based violence and the banalisation of sexual abuse
Exploring the trie of rules: a fast data structure for the representation of association rules
Get PDFAssociation rule mining techniques can generate a large volume of sequential data when implemented on transactional databases. Extracting insights from a large set of association rules has been found to be a challenging process. When examining a ruleset, the fundamental
question is how to summarise and represent meaningful mined knowledge efficiently. Many algorithms and strategies have been developed to address issue of knowledge extraction; however, the effectiveness of this process can be limited by the data structures. A better data structure can sufficiently affect the speed of the knowledge extraction process. This paper proposes a novel data structure, called the Trie of rules, for storing a ruleset that is generated by association rule mining. The resulting data structure is a prefix-tree graph structure made
of pre-mined rules. This graph stores the rules as paths within the prefix-tree in a way that similar rules overlay each other. Each node in the tree represents a rule where a consequent is this node, and an antecedent is a path from this node to the root of the tree. The evaluation showed that the proposed representation technique shows significant value. It compresses a ruleset with no data loss and benefits in terms of time for basic operations such as searching for a specific rule, which is the base for many knowledge discovery methods. Moreover, our method demonstrated a significant improvement in graph traversal time compared to traditional data structures
Adapting to uncertainty: Black swans, VUCA challenges and airport resilience strategies
Get PDFOver the past 50 years, air travel and airport passenger numbers have consistently grown, despite setbacks from crises like oil shocks, terrorism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Post-pandemic passenger trends demonstrated the resilience of aviation and airports when recovering from the effects of major crises, notwithstanding the increased future uncertainty caused by geopolitical events since then. Through a combination of airport passenger performance analysis from 2019 to 2023, an airport manager survey undertaken in 2022 and an
assessment of events and trends during this period, as reported in the literature and contemporaneously through news and information channels, this paper assesses factors affecting airports during volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) periods, focusing on post-pandemic passenger trends and current challenges. It also
explores how airports can enhance resilience through improved processes, efficiency, and stronger stakeholder relationships. We found that smaller airports, in particular, will face revenue pressures, growing competition, and increased dependence on non-aeronautical revenue. State aid, increasingly tied to decarbonisation and digitalisation, will also become more challenging to secure. Linking empirical research findings with actionable strategies to enhance airport resilience and address these issues, we introduce the VUCAIR framework, a strategic
model designed to help airports anticipate and respond effectively to ongoing VUCA conditions in the global aviation landscap