1,720,976 research outputs found

    Enhancing anaerobic treatment of domestic wastewater. State of the art, innovative technologies and future perspectives

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    Recent concerns over public health, environmental protection, and resource recovery have induced to look at domestic wastewater more as a resource than as a waste. Anaerobic treatment, owing to attractive advantages of energy saving, biogas recovery and lower sludge production, has been suggested as an alternative technology to the traditional practice of aerobic wastewater treatment, which is energy intensive, produces high excess of sludge, and fails to recover the potential resources available in wastewater. Sewage treatment by high-rate anaerobic processes has been widely reported over the last decades as an attractive method for providing a good quality effluent. Among the available high-rate anaerobic technologies, membrane bioreactors feature many advantages over aerobic treatment and conventional anaerobic systems, since high treatment efficiency, high quality effluent, pathogens retention and recycling of nutrients, were generally achieved. The objective of this paper is to review the currently available knowledge on anaerobic domestic wastewater treatment for the mostly applied high-rate systems and membrane bioreactors, presenting benefits and drawbacks, and focusing on the most promising emerging technologies, which need more investigation for their scale-up

    Dissolved methane in anaerobic effluents. A review on sustainable strategies for optimization of energy recovery or internal process reuse

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    The growing interest in public health and environmental protection, and the need of resource recovery imposed by the environmental sustainability, induce to look at the anaerobic wastewater treatment as an attractive alternative to the current aerobic treatment practice. In order to exploit the great potential of anaerobic wastewater treatment, thanks to the consolidated technology of high rate bioreactors, the presence in the treated effluent of dissolved CH4 deserves further investigation to avoid energy loss and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Reported concentrations of dissolved CH4 in anaerobic effluents can account for about half of the total production, thus strategies for its recovery as energy source, or reuse by biological oxidation within the same treatment line, are the keys to approach energy-neutral anaerobic treatment, and to valorize the intrinsic features of such process to be economically feasible and environmentally friendly. The aim of this review is to offer a complete overview of the available technologies, both for the dissolved CH4 recovery through physical methods, such as aeration, gas stripping and degassing membranes, and for its biological removal through down-flow hanging sponge reactors and the more recent proposed process based on denitrification and anaerobic CH4 oxidation (DAMO). Each technology has been deeply described highlighting weaknesses and strengths at different operating conditions and bioreactor configurations. The resulting critical analysis allowed identifying the knowledge gaps still existing in the field and the related research needs

    Biological treatment of hypersaline wastewater in a continuous two-phase partitioning bioreactor. Analysis of the response to step, ramp and impulse loadings and applicability evaluation

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    The response of a continuous two-phase partitioning bioreactor (C-TPPB) operated with polymeric tubing treating hypersaline wastewater was investigated under dynamic load conditions of step, ramp and impulse inputs of the influent flow rate. Tests were performed with synthetic wastewater consisting of NaCl (100 g L−1) and 2,4-dimethylphenol (DMP) (∼1200 mg L−1) to simulate the organic fraction. A biomass specifically acclimatized to the compound was utilized in the tests. The experimental system provides separation of the toxic wastewater flowing inside the polymeric tubing (coiled in the bioreactor) from the microbial culture present in the bulk bioreactor phase with the polymer providing permeability to the organic molecules as well as a barrier to salt transport. These features allowed achieving high performance even in the most severe loading conditions. Removal efficiencies >96% were obtained for DMP under all investigated load conditions (i.e. for influent salt and organic loads up to six times the base case load). A DMP mass balance at the end of the dynamic tests showed that 88% of the removed DMP was biodegraded and only 8% was retained into the polymer tubing itself. No significant variation of the DMP concentration in the bioreactor was observed in all cases thus demonstrating the complete removal of the transferred substrate and the effective performance of the biomass, which was not affected by the applied dynamic loads. A comparative analysis of C-TPPB results with the performance data of the classical technologies commonly applied for saline wastewater treatment has been performed to evaluate the system applicability

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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

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    We 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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