The semester thesis deals with the issue of alcohol distillation and analysis for understanding at the level for construction of the facility itself. It deals with the requirements for the distillation equipment and parameters that may affect the quality of the distillate. On the basis of which is created automated control by microcontroller. This apparatus is exposed to tests and measurements of the required values during distillation. The cooling unit was also built and measured.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to design a stripping column according to given requirements. At the beginning, the contaminant is described, in this case ammonia. Next section is putting emphasis on stripping columns, the principle, possible construction options etc. The main part of this thesis is focused on the design itself, including calculation of various parameters as well as simplified construction possibility. Drawing documentation is included in the attachment.

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is one of the most important tuber crops globally and is classified amongst the most crucial food crops in Africa. South Africa has a very vibrant potato industry, producing about 2.5 million tonnes every year, with quantities bettered only by Algeria and Egypt. Potato production is very expensive (R150 000 ha-1), with fertilizers contributing 20%. Potato is highly reliant on steady nutrient supply and any deficiencies result in poor yield. Potato fertilizer demand is higher than that of other crops such as cereals and it has a very unique demand for phosphorus (P), which is vital from its early development to maturity. In addition, potato has a very shallow root system, which compromises P uptake, making most potato cultivars ineffective in nutrient uptake. Therefore, high P fertilizer rates are applied of which <20% is utilized by plants within a few days after application and about a further 4% within the next 10 days, mostly due to fixation. The production of P fertilizer, such as super phosphate (SP) is energy-consuming, costly and emits fluorine. There is also a risk of cadmium (Cd) accumulation in soils and plants due to the heavy fertilisation, posing a risk to human health, animals and aquatic life. Runoff phosphorus leads to eutrophication of water bodies. In addition, P fertilizer production is severely threatened by declining rock phosphate (RP) reserves, expected to hit a low by 2200. This will result in a hike in P fertiliser prices as miners move to low concentration ores. The high demand of P in potato, the environmental and human health risks, the high costs and declining reserves, all call for prudent and sustainable management of P in potato production. Nitrate and ammonium results in contrasting plant metabolism and growth. Most importantly through rhizosphere modification where ammonium supply results in reduced soil pH while nitrate results in increased soil pH. The pH reduction in ammonium supplied soils increases P dissolution and availability while the opposite is noted in nitrate. Most of the studies in this phosphorus-nitrogen interaction have been conducted on tree species, grasses and cereal crops with little done on tuber crops. In addition, the application of RP directly to plants could help cut the emissions, processing costs and environmental contamination associated with chemical P fertiliser production. There is, therefore, an urgent need to develop P fertilizer management systems to effectively manage this finite resource by improving its use efficiency for maximum yield at optimum application rates. To attain this objective, two experiments were conducted, namely a laboratory study to investigate the interaction between nitrogen forms and phosphorus sources in soil columns without a test crop, and a glasshouse pot trial to investigate the same interaction with potato as test crop. The column study treatments comprised of two soil types, N supplied as ammonium or nitrate and three P sources (SP, RP and a P0) to give 12 treatments that were replicated four times to give 48 columns. Mechanical dry packing method was used. The columns were leached with one pore volume over four watering events (1, 21, 42 and 63 days) and terminated on day 90. The leachate was collected in glass bottles at the column bases and analysed for pH, phosphorus, calcium, potassium and magnesium contents. A glasshouse pot trial was set up at the University of Pretoria Experimental Farm with potato cultivar Mondial as the test crop over two seasons, with a high and low initial soil P in season one and two, respectively. One minituber was planted per 10 litre pot. Watering was done using a pressure compensated drip irrigation system. Data was collected at tuber initiation (TI) and at the end of the season (ES). Parameters assessed included plant height, dry masses, number of tubers initiated, yield, leaf tissue and soil P status. Significant phosphorus-nitrogen interactions occurred on most assessed parameters in both trials. The exceptions were pH, potassium, phosphorus, calcium and magnesium levels, at some stages of the column study. Significant phosphorus-nitrogen interactions were noted at all watering events for both soil and leachate pH, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and magnesium concentration. In the pot trial, significant phosphorus-nitrogen interactions were noted for most of the plant measurements at both the TI and ES assessment periods with a few exceptions. Ammonium + SP produced the highest tuber initiation rate and final yield, as well as highest tissue and plant available P levels in both seasons. In the leachate and soils at the end of the column study, as well as at both stages assessed in the pot trial, ammonium treatments tended to have higher P contents. In the pot trial, ammonium treatments gave taller plants, but with lower dry mass compared to nitrate. Nitrate treatments had higher soil and leachate pH compared to ammonium treatments in both trials. Plants supplied with SP tended to have longer haulms and roots, higher haulm and root biomass and higher yield compared to treatments with RP and P0. The findings of these trials indicated that ammonium results in higher phosphorus dissolution (with or without a crop) and uptake by plants due to increased soil acidity. The resulting effect on potato crop is an increase in the number of tubers initiated and higher yields. However, the positive effect of ammonium was mostly achieved in combination with superphosphate. Rock phosphate, despite the increased yields, compared to treatments without P, gave inferior plant performance and is therefore not a worthy substitute for superphosphate. / Dissertation (MSc (Agric))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Plant Production and Soil Science / MSc (Agric) / Unrestricted

The collector of an oscillating water column system (OWC) for wave energy utilization requires a bidirectional turbine that copes with pneumatic power while providing specified impedance or, in terms of an OWC designer, “damping”. Damping is realized by keeping to a specific flow rate through the turbine at a given pressure head due to the individual performance characteristic of the turbine. With the number of turbine designs increasing designers of OWC systems are facing more options to select and dimension a bidirectional turbine. Energy yield, size and hence cost of the turbine and electric generator, operational behaviour, envisaged control strategy and noise emitted by the turbine are possible criteria for selection. The primary objective of this paper is to describe a simple procedure for making a first choice of a turbine for a particular OWC application. Here we confine ourselves to a family of reaction type of turbines (axial-flow Wells and mixed-flow turbines by Moisel) with their approximately linear pressure head/volume flow rate characteristics. Starting point is the set of non-dimensional steady-state characteristics of each turbine in the family. Utilizing standard scaling laws and a very simple time domain model for the cyclic turbine operation (i.e. based one single sea state and turbine operation assumed to be fixed rotational speed), first estimates of turbine size and rotor speed, number for stages or flows, and performance curves can be determined. The resulting turbine may also serve as a starting configuration for a refined analysis, e.g. the optimization of the turbine and the complete OWC system, utilizing more complex stochastic models. Three case studies illustrate the application of the method: selection and scaling of turbines, effect of collector parameters, turbines in series and parallel.

Lime-cement columns have been used in Sweden to improve poor soil conditions since the 1970’s. The method is inexpensive and flexible, but is difficult to test since the columns are manufactured in-situ. Many test-methods have been developed for testing the column strength during the years. Most of them need to be evaluated using an empirical correction-factor known as the cone factor. The column penetration test, KPS, is the most commonly used method in Sweden, it is considered to be reliable since a large part of the column cross-section is tested. The problem is that the probe easily deviates out of the column to the softer surrounding soil. Today a pre-drilled guiding-hole, a soil-rock sounding, helps the probe to stay vertical. Although the soil-rock sounding is commonly not used for evaluation of column strength, the penetration resistance is recorded. A visual comparison between the plotted penetration resistances from the two methods shows similarities in both hard and soft areas of the columns. The relation can be measured using statistics, such as the correlation coefficient. A strong correlation was also found, suggesting that a similar equation used to evaluate the undrained shear strength from the column penetration tests can be applied with the data from the soilrock soundings. The statically pushed column penetration test probe and the rotated soil-rock sounding bit bore are likely to cause different failure modes in the column. This means that different empirical cone factors are needed when the undrained shear strength is evaluated. By evaluating the ratio between the cone factors of the column penetration test and the data from the soil-rock soundings from three sites, E-road E18 north of Stockholm, E-road E45 outside Gothenburg and at a construction site at Lidingö, the following aspects of the ratio was investigated: if the ratio was site-specific; the sensitivity to the binder content; the sleeve friction and; the sensitivity to rotational speed and rate of penetration. Average columns formed from the penetration resistance at depth from each site were used during the evaluations. The Swedish geotechnical society has standardised two methodologies that can be used for pre-drilling. The soil-rock sounding methodology which has no fixed rate of penetration or rotational speed, and the total sounding methodology, based on the Norwegian total sounding methodology which has fixed rate of penetration and rotational speed. The latter is to prefer when comparing results between sites. To remove the sleeve friction, the data from the soil-rock soundings needed to be de-trended. The amount of de-trending needed to find a constant cone factor varied at the sites between 0.5 kN/m and 1.0 kN/m. This however caused high interference, partly from scaling the variation. The cone factor for the total sounding methodology was found to be between 0.30- 0.45 times the cone factor for the column penetration test.

Motivation Sequence-based methods for phylogenetic reconstruction from (nucleic acid) sequence data are notoriously plagued by two effects: homoplasies and alignment errors. Large evolutionary distances imply a large number of homoplastic sites. As most protein-coding genes show dramatic variations in substitution rates that are not uncorrelated across the sequence, this often leads to a patchwork pattern of (i) phylogenetically informative and (ii) effectively randomized regions. In highly variable regions, furthermore, alignment errors accumulate resulting in sometimes misleading signals in phylogenetic reconstruction. Results We present here a method that, based on assessing the distribution of character states along a cyclic ordering of the taxa, allows the identification of phylogenetically uninformative homoplastic sites in a multiple sequence alignment. Removal of these sites appears to improve the performance of phylogenetic reconstruction algorithms as measured by various indices of 'tree quality'. In particular, we obtain more stable trees due to the exclusion of phylogenetically incompatible sites that most likely represent strongly randomized characters. Software The computer program noisy implements this approach. It can be employed to improving phylogenetic reconstruction capability with quite a considerable success rate whenever (1) the average bootstrap support obtained from the original alignment is low, and (2) there are sufficiently many taxa in the data set – at least, say, 12 to 15 taxa. The software can be obtained under the GNU Public License from http://www.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de/Software/noisy/.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第17884号 / 工博第3793号 / 新制||工||1580(附属図書館) / 30704 / 京都大学大学院工学研究科建築学専攻 / (主査)教授 中島 正愛, 教授 田中 仁史, 教授 金子 佳生 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

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The quality of worlds’ water resources is facing new challenges, for instance detectable concentration of various trace contaminants under the term micropollutants is discharging into water bodies from both municipal wastewater treatment plants and from on-site wastewater facilities. A project called RedMic aim at identifying and quantifying emissions of micropollutants from on-site wastewater treatments as a basis for providing innovative treatment technologies to reduce potential risks for groundwater and surface water contamination. This thesis work deals with two of the work packages in the RedMic project: a column experiment to test the capability of 10 adsorbents to remove micropollutants and a multi-criteria analysis is conducted to evaluate if a filter composed of granulated activated carbon (GAC) or ozonation can be used for on-site wastewater treatment facilities. Based on the removal efficiency of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) of selected adsorbents, two types of activated carbon reduced up to 90% DOC concentration in the effluents. Moreover, six other adsorbents also showed good removal efficiency with around 60% in the second sampling. However, the data used in this thesis was only from the initial part of the experiment that continued and the final results will be published elsewhere. Two system solutions were evaluated with multi-criteria analysis: sandbed filter with either GAC filtration (1) or with ozonation (2) System solution 1 was found to have advantage compared to system 2.

The objective of this research is to devise a procedure to generate random Set Covering Problem (SCP) instances with known optimal solutions and correlated coefficients. The procedure presented in this work can generate a virtually unlimited number of SCP instances with known optimal solutions and realistic characteristics, thereby facilitating testing of the performance of SCP heuristics and algorithms. A four-phase procedure based on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions is proposed to generate SCP instances with known optimal solutions and correlated coefficients. Given randomly generated values for the objective function coefficients and the sum of the binary constraint coefficients for each variable and a randomly selected optimal solution, the procedure: (1) calculates the range for the number of possible constraints, (2) generates constraint coefficients for the variables with value one in the optimal solution, (3) assigns values to the dual variables, and (4) generates constraint coefficients for variables with value 0 in the optimal solution so that the KKT conditions are satisfied. A computational demonstration of the procedure is provided. A total of 525 SCP instances are simulated under seven correlation levels and three levels for the number of constraints. Each of these instances is solved using three simple heuristic procedures. The performance of the heuristics on the SCP instances generated is summarized and analyzed. The performance of the heuristics generally worsens as the expected correlation between the coefficients increases and as the number of constraints increases. The results provide strong evidence of the benefits of the procedure for generating SCP instances with correlated coefficients, and in particular SCP instances with known optimal solutions.