1,720,959 research outputs found
Influence of key parameters on the removal efficiency of air pollutants by a biotrickling filter
No full textEnergy recovery from sludges: selection of case studies in Subsaharan Africa
No full textEnergy and waste management and water supply are possible means of increasing the quality of life in development countries.
One of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG, defined by the UN in September 2000) is to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation (under MDG 7 Ensure environmental sustainability). Although access to energy is not explicitly included in the MDG list, it surely may enable to reach some of these goals, such as:
• MDG 1 Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, trough the development of small economic activities to supply energy services to the population;
• MDG 2 Achieve universal primary education: supplying energy to primary and secondary schools the access to education and communication will be extended;
• MDG 3 Promote gender equality and empower women: the reduction of wood consumption will increase women quality of life, leaving them enough time to develop their economic activities;
• MDG 4 Reduce Child Mortality Rate and MDG 5 Improve maternal health, reducing the exposure to indoor pollutants produced during the wood combustion in poorly efficient stoves;
• MDG 7: Ensure environmental sustainability, reducing the deforestation.
In this paper we present two different case studies were organic waste management, access to clean water and energy were faced: water supply and sanitation in Ghana; sanitation and energy supply in northern Tanzania.
The water supply and sanitation sector in Ghana faces severe problems even if the sector has been gradually modernized through the creation of an autonomous regulatory agency, introduction of private sector participation, and decentralization of the rural supply. The water supply and sanitation infrastructure is insufficient, especially in rural areas and concerning sanitation, with a very poor control oh hygienic aspects. The proposal regards toilet facilities building and wastewater depuration system. The proposed solution can contribute to face the problem of water supply and sanitation and can be easily adopted and results interesting also under the economic point of view.
Best Ray - Bringing Energy Service to Tanzania Rural Area is an European Commission funded project (2008-2011) that aims at providing energy services to poor un-served rural communities living in Arumeru District, Northern Tanzania, through appropriate and renewable technologies. A particular attention was focused on biogas technologies, trough the participation to the Tanzanian Domestic Biogas Programme. Domestic biogas plants convert animal manure and human excrement at household level into small, but valuable, amounts of combustible methane gas that can be used in simple gas stoves for cooking or in lamps for lighting. Farmers may use biogas especially in remote rural areas where the electric grid is still not present or would be too costly to be developed.
Given the success history of TDBP, the Best Ray project team explored the possibility to install three bigger biogas plants to supply energy for the kitchens of three secondary schools. Biogas plants can be connected directly to the toilets. In this case Biogas production from toilet can fulfill between 9 a 19% of the secondary schools energy requirement. In order to completely substitute wood consumption, between 25 and 108 cows would be needed in the three schools. The introduction of cattle in the school is not feasible in the short term and goes beyond the project goals.
Furthermore, the most critical issues are those regarding the management of the plants: it is not clear who would be responsible for the proper management of the plant. Turn over of personnel in the secondary school is unpredictable and often occurs. Training of local personnel is therefore not enough to assure the management of the plan in the coming years.
Sludge disposal is also a critical issue: sludge obtained from human manure may have residual pathogen load and must be treated properly. One possibility would be to use it in jatropha plantations, since jatropha is not edible, but plantations are too close to the classrooms and/or to the dormitories, causing odour and health risks.
Considering the limited impact of biogas production on wood consumption and the relevant risks associated with the construction and the management of the plan the suggestion was to give up the project of biogas in school.
On the contrary the experiences gained on the domestic biogas program and the success of the pilot projects are showing a much larger potential for a small scale biogas plans dissemination. To make a biogas plan sustainable in the medium long run it is necessary that the management, the ownership and the benefit of the installation to be in the same individual. This can only be obtained at domestic level.
Finally, since all the schools consume more wood than expected, a better investment would be the investigation of the causes of this over consumption and eventually the substitution of the fireplace with more efficient ones.
Biogas plants for cooking and lighting in this particular area can be seen as an appropriate technology when they are installed in households, while show too many management problems when installed in schools, resulting there totally unappropriate
Application of multi-stage biofilter pilot plants to remove odor and VOCs from industrial activities air emissions
No full textThis study includes trials that were conducted to evaluate the performances of two biofiltration pilot plants for industrial applications. The first experimentation analyzed the removal of high concentrations of Volatile Organic Compounds
(VOCs) from discontinuous gas emissions resulting from the flexographic printing section of a plastic packaging production factory. The adopted layout for the experimentation was a multi-stage plant filled with two different packing
materials (shells and peat). The second trial examined the biofiltration of exhaust air from a Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF) drying process treating the dry fraction of municipal solid waste (MSW). Such exhaust streams are characterized by low
VOCs content but high odorous compounds, such as H2S and NH3. The pilot plant used for the experimentation had two stages that used shells as packing material. In both cases, the multi-stage biofilter performances indicate that the
solutions are suitable as well as applicable for use in industrial plants
Effectiveness of a multi-stage biofilter approach at pilot scale to remove odor and VOCs
No full textThis paper describes an experience conducted to evaluate the performances of a multi-stage approach using a biofiltration process applied to treat exhaust air. In particular, the experimentation was carried out using a pilot plant for the biofiltration of exhaust air from a solid recovered fuel drying process treating the dry fraction of municipal solid waste. Such exhaust streams are characterized by low concentrations of volatile organic compounds and high presence of odorous compounds, such as H2S and NH3. The adopted layout for the experimentation was a multi-stage plant. Each of the two stages (biotrickling filters) used seashells as packing material. In particular, the choice of seashell was defined after the evaluation of the hydrodynamic behavior of different packing materials at the same running conditions. Moreover, some velocity measurements were conducted with the aim at improving the geometry of the reactors and the fan sizing. The multi-stage biofiltration performances indicate that the solutions are suitable as well as applicable for use in industrial plants
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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