Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-24T22:53:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_6154_Dissertação_Jairo_Oliveira.pdf: 2928138 bytes, checksum: 19b741972744a79f7b42652057adbb54 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-12-10 / Efluentes são lançados diariamente em corpos dágua sem nenhum tipo de tratamento com elevados teores de óleos e graxas (OG) e constituem um enorme problema ambiental. Estes resíduos potencialmente disponíveis podem ser utilizados para o aproveitamento energético, como o uso de óleo para a produção de biodiesel. Como a maior barreira para produção de biodiesel envolve o custo de matéria prima, caixas de gordura de restaurantes, indústrias e de estações de tratamento de efluentes podem ser utilizados como matéria prima para produção de biocombustível, pois apresentam grandes quantidades de óleos e graxas sem nenhum custo. No entanto, óleos e graxas residuais contêm altos teores de ácidos graxos livres (AGL), e como a via preferencial para a produção de biodiesel é a transesterificação alcalina, pode ocorrer a formação de sabão como produto final, prejudicando a separação do glicerol e diminuindo o rendimento da reação. Desta forma, a transesterificação enzimática e ácida podem se apresentar como alternativas promissoras, visto que podem catalisar a modificação tanto de triglicerídeos como de ácidos graxos livres. O objetivo deste trabalho foi verificar a possibilidade de utilização de quatro tipos de resíduos oleosos do saneamento (Escumas de caixas de gordura de um Restaurante Universitário, de uma Indústria de Alimentos, de uma Estação de Tratamento de Efluentes e de Lodos de Fossas e Tanques Sépticos), caracterizar as propriedades físico-químicas dos óleos e graxas extraídos, bem como avaliar processos de geração de biodiesel envolvendo catalisador ácido (H2SO4) e enzimático (Candida antarcticaimobilizada). Os resíduos estudados apresentaram altos teores de óleos e graxas e a caracterização físico-química mostrou elevados índices de acidez, saponificação e umidade. Foram detectados e quantificados os principais ácidos graxos saturados e insaturados por Cromatografia Líquida de Alta Eficiência (CLAE). A produção do biodiesel a partir das matérias primas provenientes de caixas de gordura apresentaram altos níveis de conversões, maior ou igual 90%, o que demonstra que ambos os catalisadores (H2SO4 e a lipase Candida antarctica) apresentam-se eficientes na esterificação de matérias primas residuais ácidas. A melhor conversão encontrada foi de 96,5% utilizando o material lipídico proveniente da caixa de gordura do Restaurante Universitário da UFES catalisado enzimaticamente a 50ºC e razão molar 1:9 (óleo:álcool).

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Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis examines the challenges that the Federal and Amhara National Regional State (ANRS)1 Courts of Ethiopia face in the realisation of legal and social justice. The Ethiopia Constitution (1995) under Article 43 declares that Ethiopian people have the right to improved living standards and sustainable development where the basic aim of development activity is to enhance, through their full participation, citizens’ capacity for development and the meeting of their basic needs. The Constitution underlined this as the ‘North Star’ of social justice which would be meaningless unless dispute resolution mechanisms empower litigants and the people in gaining social justice and thus the attainment of the Constitutional objective. The attainment of the social justice is however problematic as the legal justice the formal court is administering does not meet the people’s Constitutional expectations. The mismatch between legal and social justice, coupled with the legal history and the prevalence of justice pluralism, tends to force the People of Ethiopia to use non-formal systems of dispute resolution. Thus, there is a need to refine the formal and non-formal systems and to align them with the Constitutional imperative of social justice. Judicial reform is being implemented, with the help of international institutions like the World Bank, but the underlining concern is whether the World Bank proposals on judicial and legal reform will meet these needs or whether they are too located in Western values, the suggestion being that they may suffer from the same problems as other modernisation projects. There also lies a tension between the Constitutional expectation, the conceptualisation of justice by professionals and clients, and the overall purpose of securing justice and preventing injustice. Litigants’ preference for justice is itself in conflict with other litigants and the diverse institutional understanding of justice that made the attainment of social justice a difficult exercise. The area is found to be so problematic that there is a need to re-connect the practical conceptualisation of justice with the Constitutional conceptualisation of social justice which the Federal and ANRS courts require the redoing of justice so that the conceptualisation of justice would not cause irreversible damage to people’s societal, economic, and ecological demands and to the sustainability of justice and development.

This thesis provides a critical account of state transformation on one of the last ‘frontiers’ of mineral exploration and extraction. Mongolia’s struggle to consolidate its extractive development strategy lies in a fundamental tension between the nature of global capital investment and the responsiveness of national democratic institutions to their political electorate. In this sense, Mongolia is part of a broader pattern of state formation in a global era. This pattern has been recognised in established Western democracies, but, as this thesis argues, vulnerable states in the periphery of the global economy are also being affected with potentially more immediate and alarming consequences. In the context of a transition to a development strategy reliant on the extraction and export of raw minerals (primary commodities) since 1997, the Mongolian state has entered the world of competitive international finance (as opposed to development loans) and investment, in which courting and preserving the interest and ‘confidence’ of the investor is paramount for the government. In the early years of the millennium (2003-2012), Mongolian citizens became increasingly engaged in democratic political processes and particularly vocal regarding the lack of perceived public benefit from mining investment and the damaging socio-environmental consequences of extraction in rural areas. Thus, I argue that a constitutional struggle played itself out between the contradictory impulses of the state towards investors and citizens as evidenced in the see-saw cycles of legal and policy reform between 1997 and 2013. Consequently, by the end of 2013, the general downturn in global commodity prices and the particular “vote of no confidence” in Mongolia’s investment environment from the majority of investors led to the consolidation of a cross-party ‘stability consensus’ within the state. The process of ‘stabilising’ the investment environment has occurred at the expense of the democratic constitution of the state, demonstrated in the curtailment of Parliamentary powers over policy-making processes, the limitation of self-government for sub-national administrations and the restriction of civil society organisations’ participation in political processes. As a post-socialist state adjusting to the constraints of the global economy and the cycles of commodity markets, Mongolia provides concrete evidence of the antagonistic relationship between national democracy and global economic integration, and the reality of the latter’s constitutional impacts.

This is a study of human response to the Arctic and Antarctic environments. It is based on two sources of data: the content analysis of original diaries of polar explorers, and the behavioural evaluation of contemporary crews in polar locations. In the latter, four polar stations were chosen, two in each polar region with a total of fifty-five experimental subjects. Twenty-seven other subjects acted as controls for both polar regions: a northern control group located at a semi-isolated site in Canada, and the southern group located in an Argentinian city. Methods applied in this research included the design and coding of categories which were content analyzed from the original diaries of explorers, and on-site procedures. On-site procedures included psychometric material, participant-observation reports and unstructured interviews. Fifteen behavioural measures within the domain of personality, perception of the environment, affection, social stress and community behaviour were administered. It was hypothesized that the human response would be similar in both polar regions because of environmental and sociological similarities, and that the polar setting would affect men and women in a negative way. Results showed that: (i) the polar environment is not perceived as stressful by the crews - a low anxiety state across both polar regions was found, (ii) traumatic experiences of the explorers had led to the perception of the environment in a negative perspective - yet the winter seemed to be a relaxing phase for the crews rather than stressful, (iii) personnel stationed at polar sites may possess special characteristics which distinguish them from the majority of the population, (iv) although cross-cultural differences exist, they are not as strong as might be anticipated - the environment exerts a unifying influence, (v) differences in gender-response are difficult to assess due to the small number of women subjects, but some differences with controls were noted. / Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies / Graduate

Mass changes of polar ice sheets have an important societal impact, because they affect global sea level. Estimating the current mass budget of ice sheets is equivalent to determining the balance between the surface mass gain through precipitation and the outflow across the grounding line. In Antarctica, the latter is mainly governed by oceanic processes and outlet glacier dynamics.<p>In this thesis, we assess the mass balance of a part of eastern DronningMaud Land via an input/output method. Input is given by recent surface accumulation estimations of the whole drainage basin. The outflow at the grounding line is determined from the radar data of a recent airborne survey and satellite-based velocities using a flow model of combined plug flow and simple shear. We estimate the regional mass balance in this area to be between 1.88±8.50 and 3.78±3.32 Gt a−1 depending on the surface mass balance (SMB) dataset used. This study also reveals that the plug flow assumption is acceptable at the grounding line of ice streams.<p>The mass balance of drainage basins is governed by the dynamics of their outlet glaciers and more specifically the flow conditions at the grounding line. Thanks to an airborne radar survey we define the bed properties close to the grounding line of the West Ragnhild Glacier (WRG) in the Sør Rondane Mountains. Geometry and reflectivity analyses reveal that the bed of the last 65 km upstream of the grounding line is sediment covered and saturated with water. This setting promotes the dominance of basal motion leading to a change in the flow regime: in the interior flow is governed by internal deformation while its relative importance decreases to become driven by basal sliding.<p>Subsequently we present the results of the reconstruction of the SMB across an ice rise through radar data and inverse modelling. The analysis demonstrates that atmospheric circulation was stable during the last millennium. Ice rises induce an orographic uplift of the atmospheric flow and therefore influence the pattern of the SMB across them, resulting in an asymmetric SMB distribution. Since the geometry of the internal reflection horizons observed in radar data depends on the SMB pattern, the asymmetry observed in radar layers reveals the trajectories of air masses at the time of deposit. We present an original and robust method to quantify this SMB distribution. Combining shallow and deep radar layers, SMB across Derwael Ice Rise is reconstructed. Two methods are employed as a function of the depth of the layers: i.e. the shallow layer approximation for the surface radar layers and an optimization technique based on an ice flow model for the deeper ones. Both methods produce similar results. We identify a difference in SMB magnitude of 2.5 between the flanks and the ice rise divide, as well as a shift of ≈4 km between the SMB maximum and the crest. Across the ice rise, SMB exhibits a very large variability, ranging from 0.3 to 0.9 mw.e. a−1. This anomaly is robust in time.<p>Finally we draw a comprehensive description of the Sør Rondane Mountains sector. The glacial system is close to the equilibrium and seems stable but evidences suggest that it is a fragile equilibrium. The proximity of the open ocean certainly favours the interaction between warm water and the ice shelf cavity conducting to potential important melting. The thinning associated with this melting can detach the ice shelf from pinning points. This will reduce the buttressing from the ice shelf, outlet glaciers will accelerate and mass transfer toward the ocean will increase. Therefore, the future of Antarctic Ice Sheet directly depends on the changes affecting its boundaries and assessing the sensitivity of the ice sheets is essential to quantify and anticipate the future variation of mass balance. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Previous studies have shown significant warming through the 1990s in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS); but the records used in those studies end in early 2000, preventing trend analysis into the latest decade. Fourteen new snowpits and firn cores were collected in 2010 and 2011, which have been combined with previous cores to extend the isotopic records over WAIS. Significance of these isotopic patterns across WAIS was determined and is used to re-evaluate the warming of the West Antarctic interior over recent decades. We find that isotopic records longer than 50 years are needed to assess climate trends due to decadal variability. When assessed over periods greater than 50 years, there is a statistically significant warming trend over central WAIS. However, the isotopes in the 2000s are anomalously low in the isotopic records, which challenge the recent suggestion that the warming trend is accelerating. We attribute the isotopic low over the most recent decade to the coupling effect of anomalously low temperatures over central WAIS and associated increase in sea ice in the adjacent seas. This work strongly indicates that decadal variability and likely climate trends are both driven, at least in part, by atmospheric variability in the tropics as well as at high latitudes.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / With the goal of determining ice sheet history in the central Ross Sea since the late Miocene, the provenance of glacial till from IODP expedition 374 site U1522 was assessed using a suite of three analyses. A total of 3,869 zircons, between 250-63 microns in size, from sixteen different cores were measured for U-Pb isotopes via LA-ICP-MS. Zircon data was compared to neodymium isotope and clast lithology datasets from collaborators. Site U1522 shows three distinct provenance shifts from the late Miocene to the Pleistocene, two of which are coincident with Ross Sea Unconformities three and two. Late Miocene samples have abundant Cretaceous zircon populations, radiogenic neodymium values, and clasts interpreted as having a West Antarctic provenance. In latest Miocene samples, zircons are mostly Ross Orogeny age (c. 470 615 Ma) and Cretaceous zircon grains are almost absent, neodymium values are relatively un radiogenic, and dolerite clasts are present signaling a shift to East Antarctic derived ice. Above Ross Sea Unconformity 3, early to mid Pliocene samples show a shift back to West Antarctic provenance with abundant Cretaceous zircons and more radiogenic neodymium values. Late Pliocene to Pleistocene samples, deposited above Ross Sea Unconformity 2, reflect dominant East Antarctic provenance with few Cretaceous zircon dates, relatively un radiogenic neodymium values, and the presence of dolerite clasts. These data are broadly in agreement with ice sheet interpretations suggested by clast analysis from ANDRILL site AND-1B. Permo-Triassic zircon dates suggest the presence of unexposed bedrock of this age beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet based on their association with Cretaceous dates that have not been reported from East Antarctica. The zircon dataset also reveals two late Miocene intervals with a previously undocumented Eocene Oligocene magmatic event ~30 40 Ma. The coexistence of Cretaceous dates in these intervals suggests a likely West Antarctic source. The absence of Eocene Oligocene zircons in subsequent Plio Pleistocene sediments may be explained by substantial erosion and offshore deposition of the West Antarctic interior, including volcanic edifices following the Middle Miocene Climatic Transition.