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Co-firing of pressed sugar beet pulp with coal in a laboratory-scale fluidised bed combustor
No full textRelatively cheap, poor quality, unprepared biomass materials can be difficult to burn efficiently on a large commercial scale because of their variable composition, relatively low calorific values and high moisture contents. Consequently it is often necessary to co-fire these materials with a hydrocarbon support fuel to ensure stable and efficient combustion. Fluidised bed combustion (FBC) is a promising method for burning mixtures of fuels with widely differing individual characteristics although there is a need for further information on the “optimum” conditions for efficient operation as well as on the proportions of support fuel which should be used in particular applications. This paper is therefore concerned with co-firing of coal with pressed sugar beet pulp, (a solid biomass with an average moisture content of 71%), in a lab scale (<25 kW net thermal input) fluidised bed combustor.
The project was undertaken in collaboration with British Sugar plc. who operate a large coal-fired fluidised bed, with a nominal thermal rating of 40 MW, to generate hot combustion gases for use in subsequent drying applications. The combustion characteristics of different coal and pressed pulp mixtures were investigated over a wide range of operating conditions. For stable combustion the maximum proportion of pulp by mass in the blended fuel was limited to 50%. However under these co-firing conditions a fixed bed temperature can be achieved with 20% lower fluidising air (when compared with coal alone) since evaporation of the moisture in the pressed pulp provides additional cooling of the bed. This reduction in excess air will be beneficial for the output of the full scale plant at British Sugar since at present the flow rate of the fluidising air and hence the amount of coal which can be burnt is limited by high pressure drops in the bed air distributor system. The pressed pulp has relatively low nitrogen levels and hence a further benefit of co-firing is that NOx emissions are reduced by about 25%.
Agglomeration of the bed can be a problem when co-firing biomass because of the formation of “sticky” low melting point alkali metal silicate eutectics which result in subsequent adhesion of the ash and sand particles. Consequently, longer term co-firing tests were undertaken with a 50/50 blended fuel by mass. Problems of bed agglomeration were not observed over the duration of these tests and moreover, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) studies indicated that the levels of alkali metals in the ash were relatively low.British Sugar and the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA
Vinasse - A potential biofuel - Cofiring with coal in a fluidised bed combustor
No full textIn this study, vinasse, a by-product of sugar industry, was analysed for its behaviour during combustion in a fluidised bed combustor. Due to potential agglomeration problems owing to its high potassium content, the vinasse was first pre-assessed using agglomeration indices and muffle furnace tests. Subsequently it was co-fired with Thoresby singles coal in a bubbling fluidised bed of 25 kW thermal capacity. It is found that the agglomeration indices are good indicators of agglomeration tendency of biomass fuels and should be used to pre-analyse the material before firing in a fluidised bed. It was observed during cofiring in fluidised bed that agglomeration occurred very quickly due to high alkali content of vinasse. It is found that not only the alkali content of the material but its feed rate and combustion temperature are also controlling parameters for agglomeration. Vinasse can be used as potential fuel source by carefully controlling operational parameters or by adding alkali getters such as kaoline.British Sugar and the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA
Participatory research, people with intellectual disabilities and ethical approval: making reasonable adjustments to enable participation
No full textAbstract
Aims and objectives: The aim of this paper is to explore how making reasonable adjustments to the process of securing ethical approval for research can facilitate the meaningful involvement of people with intellectual disabilities as members of a research team. This is achieved through critical reflection upon the approach taken within one participatory research study whose objective was to explore how people with intellectual disabilities understand abuse.
Background: Internationally participatory research studies (in which active involvement of community members in all stages of the research process is sought) are becoming increasingly common in the context of health care and, more specifically, within research involving people with intellectual disabilities. However, whilst it is acknowledged that participatory research gives rise to specific ethical challenges, how (or if) involvement in securing ethical approval is facilitated, is not discussed in most research reports. The significance of this paper is that it seeks to address this gap by exploring how meaningful participation can be promoted by making reasonable adjustments.
Methods: Within the study the research team worked in collaboration with the ethics committee to identify potential barriers that could prevent the participation of members of the research team who had intellectual disabilities. Reasonable adjustments (such as redesigning forms) were made to the processes involved in securing ethical approval.
Conclusions: This study demonstrated that it is possible to ensure that ethical standards are upheld and the requirements of ethics committees met whilst also facilitating the meaningful involvement of people with intellectual disabilities.
Relevance to clinical practice: The reasonable adjustments approach explored within this paper can be translated into the context of clinical practice: making changes to the way that services are delivered can promote greater involvement of people with intellectual disabilities in their own healthcare.The paper arose form a study funded by the Big Lotter
Towards a philosophy of theatre inspired by Aristotle’s poetics and post-structuralist aesthetics in relation to three South African plays
No full textI have attempted a reading of Aristotle in terms of mimesis, ethos, mythos, lexis,
hamartia, anagnorisis, peripeteia, catharsis and anamnesis - as an existential “being there” (Dasein) of the characters’ freedom and actual historicity - in three of my
plays in which I performed or witnessed in productions in England, Wales, three
Scandinavian countries, the U.S. and South Africa. I have analysed other Southern
African “womanist” performative drama and feminist theatre. I assume with the
ancient Greeks that in serious theatre there is theoria, an educated, discursive looking,
which involves a dialectics of logos in dianoia intertwined in the mythos – ethical
truth in the discourse of the plot. Whilst aesthetics cannot be reduced to psychobiography, creative writing is motivated in part by the author’s and the dramatic subjects’ psychoanalytically understood personal and political unconscious placed in the ethos – the character on the stage. The aesthetics of tragedy relate to both peripeteia (reversals) and anagnorisis (recognition of responsibility) which occur within an arc of development, crisis and denouement of the vicissitudes of purported wisdom in understanding how performative drama and critical theatre have been
presented in what has become known as The Struggle in a post-apartheid South
Africa and post-colonial Zimbabwe by comparison with historical conditions in South America, India, even China. The values of nous, phronesis and sophia, intuitive,
practical and interpretative wisdom are connected to the Nicomachean and Eudemian
Ethics with which the tragic-comic hero and his Other are imbued or violate. The
post-structuralist aesthetic as developed in the literary theory of the twentieth century
is essentially the interaction of synchronic and diachronic language emerging from
the signifiance and the semiosis of the chora (the feminine or maternal unconscious)
within the de-familarisation techniques of Russian and Czech Formalism. This
provides a creative and meaningful limit to a consciousness of being-white and beingblack-
in-the-world against disempowering Nothingness or perceived Otherness
threatening moral beings. Nothingness and the Other are characterised magically and
as witch-craft in oral-cultures which deny the unconscious and resort to paranoia and
persecution of Otherness in the subject projected onto the other – the “colonial
personality”. Shades of Brown has been re-written as Jannie Veldsman – A Film
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Scenario and I have incorporated into a revised The Cape Orchard a retrospective
anticipation of the coming of the new South Africa. I reflect on what tragic drama on
the stage and in real life in South Africa means now that the new South Africa is over
its honeymoon period and faces serious problems of failed governance. Within the
dialectic of an enlightened rabbinical morality of Hillel the Elder (“What is hateful to
you do not do to others….” and “If I am not for myself who will be for me…?”) and
Kant’s categorical imperative of human beings as a priori ends, I follow the fortunes
of an old Jewish veteran of The Struggle, dating back to the Defiance Campaign of
1952/3. Fugard’s work is exemplary in fostering a sense of Sartre’s Nothingness and
nihilation which “haunts” Being and is the space of undecidability in relation to my
condition of freedom allowing the transcendence of Being. Being asserts reparation
and redemption in the face of the depressive and paranoid subject/object split in the
subject’s being-in-the-world. Plays ideally submerge this existentialist,
psychoanalytic and Aristotelian dramaturgy in the form of Kierkegaard’s faith and
Nietzsche’s will which are part of the Encompassing in Karl Jasper’s metaphysics -
the residue of a Judaeo-Christian ethics facing the anomie and aporia of the postmodern.
The new South Africa was only ostensibly built on Greek and Judaeo-
Christian secular ethics – “truth and reconciliation”. It inherited state, revolutionary
and criminal violence, as well as a sophisticated economic infrastructure, masspoverty
and a segregated educational, social and welfare system which in the milieu
of ANC incompetence and corruption have for the very poor got worse but to the
benefit of a new African oligarchy, the beneficiaries of a dysfunctional affirmative
action policy. What is to be done? Irigaray’s striking metaphor “the speculum of the
Other woman” suggests that we are reflected by the instrument we use for
investigating what may be Other to us: “we” are westerners trying to live in Africa.
“We” are Other – not as autochthonous as the African majority. But the
autochthonous can also behave as Other and may even fail to recognise the Other in
themselves. Franz Fanon’s “colonial personality”, like ex-president Thabo Mbeki,
misunderstands the colonial Other in himself which, disastrously, he projects and
attacks in the imaginary and persecutory Other, only to suffer the return of the Real,
as do the dramatic fictions Van Tonder in Shades of Brown, Dianne Cupido in The
Cape Orchard and Harry Grossman the old man’s son in The Zulu and the Zeide
(inspired by a short story by Dan Jacobson).
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The Russian and Czech Formalists and Structuralists show us how to foreground the
Real through techniques of de-familiarisation which can be applied to modernist and
post-modernist “womanist” performance drama and feminist theatre. Defamilarisation,
especially in an Africa struggling between failed and successful
colonialism and often ruled by more or less corrupt elites, sensitizes us to a moral
nihilism which characterises the failed African state - described by Conrad as a “heart
of darkness” transcended in aletheia – being oneself in the self-showing light of one’s
ethos operating through a personal and political unconscious mystified in the rhetoric
of oral-cultures. Playwrights such as Yael Farber, Fraser Grace, Aletta Bezuidenhout
and Fatima Dike express a semiosis of the unconscious and the signifiance and
“absurdity” of logos suggesting that all is not lost in post-apartheid Southern Africa as
regards human values, whilst struggling with the political correctness demanded in
The Struggle. A partially successful colonialism in parts of Africa could within a
British education system, produce a Wole Soyinka who transcends the propaganda of
agit-prop by showing the parabolic arc of tragedy afflicted with peripeteia. The
weight of African backwardness is not only the negative heritage of colonialism and
slavery but Africa’s immersion in traditional partially modernised, but still
patriarchal, often tribally and religiously split oral-cultures. These enable the colonial
personality to unconsciously or opportunistically exploit his paranoiac sense of his
victimage at the expense of the writing-cultures of development which entail
anamnesis and the redemption through anagnorisis
Evaluating the role of Cardiac Genetics Nurses in inherited cardiac conditions services using a Maturity Matrix
No full textBackground: Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death worldwide and genetic risk factors play a role in nearly all such cases. In the UK, health service capacity to meet either current or future estimated needs of people affected by inherited cardiac conditions (ICC) is inadequate. In 2008 the British Heart Foundation funded nine three-year Cardiac Genetic Nurses (CGN) posts across England and Wales to enhance ICC services. The CGNs were experienced cardiac nurses who had additional training in genetics and acted to coordinate cardiac and genetics service activities.
Aim: To create and apply a framework against which progress in ICC service improvement could be measured over time following the CGN appointments.
Methods: A performance grid (Maturity Matrix) articulating standards in 5 domains against stages of ICC service development was created by stakeholders through a consensus approach. The Maturity Matrix (MM) was used to guide staged self-assessments by the CGNs between 2009-2011. A 6-point scale was used to locate progress from ‘emerging’ to ‘established’, represented graphically by spider diagrams.
Results: Progress in all domains was significant for new, emerging and established services. It was most notable for effective utilisation of care pathways and efficient running of clinics. Commitment to family-centred care was evident.
Conclusion: The ICC-MM provided a comprehensive framework for assessing ICC services and has merit in providing guidance on development. Cardiac genetics nurses can help integrate care across specialisms, facilitating the development of effective and sustainable ICC services at new, developing, and more established ICC service locations.Full text available via open access at journal website.British Heart Foundatio
Killer decisions: The role of cognition, affect and ‘expertise’ in homicide
No full textThis paper explores the decision-making processes of people who kill, paying particular attention to the role of
situational, interactional and emotional factors. The paper considers what killers were thinking and feeling immediately
prior to and during the moments of homicide, what situational and emotional factors influence their
decision to become embroiled in a lethal encounter and the extent to which they draw upon prior knowledge
and ‘expertise’ in planning and/or executing homicide. The overall aim is to reviewexisting research to illuminate
whether and how those who commit homicide adopt particular cognitive processes that inform their ‘decisions’
to become involved in a lethal act
Values, diversity and the justification of EU institutions
No full textLiberal theories of justice typically claim that political institutions should be justifiable to those who live under them – whatever their values. The more such values diverge, the greater the challenge of justifiability. Diversity of this kind becomes especially pronounced when the institutions in question are supranational. Focusing on the case of the European Union, this article aims to address a basic question: what kinds of values should inform the justification of political institutions facing a plurality of value systems? One route to an answer is provided by John Rawls, who famously distinguishes between comprehensive and political values, and defends the exclusion of the former from the foundations of a political theory of justice. This article questions the tenability of the Rawlsian solution, and draws attention to an alternative twofold conceptual distinction: that between minimal and non-minimal and between substantive and procedural values. Minimal values are meant to be as independent as possible of controversial conceptions of the good and views of the world, regardless of whether these are comprehensive or purely political. It will be argued that their endorsement may thus further specify the nature of what should be shared in order to justify political institutions in conditions of pluralism. In order to refine further the account of such a basis of justification, two variants of minimalism will be presented according to whether they invest substantive or procedural values. Substantive values qualify the property of an outcome; procedural values qualify the property of a procedure. The latter part of the article consists of a ‘face-off’ between minimal proceduralism and minimal substantivism, considering reasons in favour of the adoption of each. The result, we suggest, is a helpful reorientation of the political dimension of the value debates to which the multiplicity of values amid contemporary European horizons give rise
A sense of dignity in later life: a qualitative study on the views of older women migrants from minoritised backgrounds
No full textPurpose
– Research evidence indicates the need for studies that explore the salience of dignity from the perspective of older people from a range of ethno-linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Drawing findings from a mixed-methods study on social-care expectations of community-dwelling older women from black and minority-ethnic backgrounds, the purpose of this paper is to explore the interrelationships between life-course events (such as migration) and the roles adopted by the women throughout their lives, which shaped their understanding of dignity.
Design/methodology/approach
– Face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with 32 older women in Wales were conducted in the participants’ first languages. The interview schedule was developed, piloted and peer-reviewed; it covered the themes of migration, perceptions of dignity, dignity in later life, perceptions of care and care with dignity. Transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis. This paper focuses on what dignity meant to older women and how a sense of dignity was fostered in later life.
Findings
– For the participants, a sense of dignity in later life was shaped by migration to the UK, and their shifting, transnational understanding of growing old in the UK and of the perceived worth and value of the roles they played. Although some women also saw other platforms (such as work and their status as professionals) as being of importance, a sense of purpose fostered in their roles as wives, mothers and grandmothers, and as mentors and guardians of cultural knowledge, underpinned their understanding of dignity, and reinforced their sense of acknowledgement and worth. Fostered from an early age through interactions with the family and close community (religious, cultural or ethnic), respect for older people was revealed to remain a key element of the participants’ personal and cultural value systems, as were the ways in which respect should be both earned and manifested. The sense of heightened vulnerability, because of advancing age, and the impact of cumulative negative encounters and racialised micro-aggressions, were real and pressing.
Practical implications
– Given the changing demographic of the older population throughout Europe and the world, there is a need to raise awareness among policy makers and practitioners of the importance of dignity from a range of perspectives – providing first-hand accounts that bring these to life, and data that can be used to help develop effective interventions.
Originality/value
– This paper adds to the understanding of dignity from a transnational, multi-ethnic perspective; the potential impact of multiple social positions (being old, being a woman, being a migrant and being from a minority-ethnic group) on the perception of being treated and regarded as important and valuable; and the need to raise awareness among policy makers and practitioners of the importance of dignity from a range of perspectives, providing first-hand accounts that bring these to life and that can be used to help develop effective social-care interventions.Welsh Governmen
A conceptual framework for supply: supply chain systems architecture and integration design based on practice and theory in the North Wales slate mining industry
No full textThe aim of this thesis is to contribute to knowledge in the form of a new theory for supply
chain strategy formulation. The objective is to design evaluation criteria, specific to the
context of greenfield project architecture and integration design. This study addressed the
aim and objective by synthesising existing methods and techniques which are outlined into
a research framework of supply chain strategy problems. The study applied the case study
and action research methods to pursue conceptual validity from the process of investigating
the supply chain strategy formulation in a specific situation and presented the data
collection and analysis process.
The thesis derived a conceptual framework for investigating and identifying the relationship
between multiple elements, dimensions, forces and factors that influence and affect supply
chain strategy formulation in a greenfield project context, specific to the mining industry.
The contribution to knowledge emerged from building upon the architecture of the
conceptual framework, through synthesising existing techniques and adapting these
techniques, to extend and redefine the existing knowledge on the practice of supply chain
strategy formulation. Through critical analysis, a number of critical problems emerged and
the process of addressing these problems, resulted with a new framework for evaluating
the relationship between business and supply chain strategy, specific to greenfield project
and integration context.
The contribution to knowledge also derived from addressing the emerging obstacles in the
process of identifying, defining and formulating, the visions and goals of individual supply
chain participants from implicit into an explicit form. The process synthesised the
knowledge for conceptualising the idea, through developing and evaluating information
and issues, to derive insights into the complex and abstract concept, of greenfield project
business and supply chain strategy formulation.
The conceptual framework and evaluation framework advanced into designing greenfield
project supply chain integration strategy. The process involved categorising individual
supply chain strategic interests, decisions and problems into formulation areas, and was
aimed at defining the process of greenfield project integration strategy as a system of
concepts containing formulation areas, formulation principles, segregated into subcategories
of formulation imperatives and formulation concepts.
The thesis contributed to knowledge with advancement of the design engineering method,
which enables visualisation of the supply chain strategy evaluation process. The design is
not personalised for individual company business strategy or supply chain strategy
formulation. The method was personalised to evaluate the integration of individual goals,
and concepts in a supply chain strategy formulation. The novelty that emerged from the
thesis was a conceptual framework for greenfield project architecture and integration
design. The greenfield project architecture and design derived in the thesis a proposed
conceptual system for applying the conceptual framework and the evaluation criteria
A comparison of child marriage and polygamy from a human rights perspective: are the arguments equally cogent?
No full textThis article examines international human rights treaties and considers the extent to which child marriage and polygamy infringe their provisions. The paper demonstrates that the two customs often violate the same human rights, for example the right to equality, and that several harmful practices, such as female genital mutilation and spousal abuse, are sometimes associated with both forms of marriage. However, the article concludes by asserting that the case against child marriage is stronger than that against polygyny and as a consequence the international community is unlikely to draft a treaty that outlaws the latter