<p>170531.</p>

<p>170531.</p>

<p>170531.</p>

<p>170531.</p>

EU regulations, decisions and policy making are matters that concern every resident in the EU and risk and benefit assessment and analysis form part of the EU decision and policy making. This thesis discusses the decision/policy making in the EU and the risk assessment activities of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), as well as ECHA’s socio-economic analysis activities. It also studies the role of the European Commission and the Comitology process. The EU regulates what chemicals or food stuffs/ingredients, for instance additives, may be made available in the European market. How the decisions are made about what is allowed and what not, and who makes those decisions, is not necessarily evident due to the complexity of the processes. In this thesis the decision making at different stages of the EU regulatory processes has been identified and analysed in order to find out by whom and how the decisions are made. The method used was a literature search with an overview of the existing theories and research from the areas of EU decision making, risk assessment and risk management. The regulatory processes were studied from a decision making perspective with the aim to identify and record possible decision making opportunities of different actors beyond the European Commission. The decision making opportunities were classified and organised based on their level of impact to the processes. Two real cases were studied: the restriction of lead in jewellery under REACH Annex XV restrictions and the authorisation of ammonium chloride in food under Flavourings regulation. Decision making opportunities and methods were looked for in those processes. It was found that while, in the studied cases, there appeared possibilities to ensure science based good regulatory decision/policy making, it remained uncertain and possibly politicised. It was also revealed that in certain steps the processes lacked transparency.

No description available.

Railways are one of the most important transport systems. It is crucial to have a rail network that is safe, reliable and available. Asset Management for railways involves the optimization of the maintenance activities based on asset condition, life cycle cost and availability of equipment. Irregularities in the track cause the wear of rail resulting in passenger discomfort, speed restrictions and line closures. The track is inspected for these irregularities and corrected using a tamping vehicle. The degradation behavior of the track can be modelled to predict the future degradation. This prediction forms the basis of the maintenance planning based on the expected track condition. A petri net model can be used to simulate the track degradation, inspection and maintenance process over a period of 20 years, and the outputs of the model are used for LCC analysis. Further, the cost is optimized with the safety risk to suggest maintenance threshold levels and Inspection Interval. The proposed methodology will assist the maintenance decision system for Asset Management of Railway track, which is strategic and cost effective. This methodology is demonstrated using a case study of a Line 414 in Sweden, by modelling the track behavior with Standard Deviation of Longitudinal Level. It can be further expanded and adapted for maintenance planning for similar assets within railways.

This is a master thesis report in vehicle aerodynamics and cooling air management. The thesis is carried out at China Euro Vehicle Technology (CEVT) AB and is part of the course P7010T, Master Thesis in Space Engineering at Luleå University of Technology (LTU). The thesis has been supervised by Mattias Olander at CEVT and Gunnar Hellström at LTU and was done over 20 weeks during the spring semester of 2019. As the vehicle industry moves from mostly using combustion engines to hybrid and electric power systems the importance of decreasing cooling air drag has increased. Cooling air drag can be around 5-15% of the total drag, and a lot of research has been done over the years on how to decrease it. Cooling drag is defined as the force acting in x-direction from the cooling air flowing through the engine bay. The air is let in through the grilles to cool down the engine and escapes through different outtakes usually below the vehicle and through the wheelhouse. The air loses a lot of energy inside the engine bay as well as it changes in temperature. In this study a method has been developed to include the energy equation in the aerodynamic computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. Research has also been done on which design parameters that affect the cooling air drag and how air ducts could be designed to better transport the flow to and from the radiators without loosing to much in energy. In the first part of this study a method was developed to solve the vehicle aerodynamics with energy equation included. All method development and design parameter tests weredone on the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) A model, which is a CEVT concept car. The model was first implemented on a simple symmetric model and then on a full model. It was tested both with a normal steady state solution and a pseudo transient solutions. The pseudo transient solution proved to solve for a faster convergence, although both methods worked well. Therefore the design parameter testing was chosen to be done with the pseudo transient solver.The design parameter testing was done in two steps, first opening and closing different outlets and then trying to implement different cooling air ducts. The first study showed that air through the wheelhouses increases the drag as well as having air entering only inthe upper grille and travelling down through floor and wheelhouse. In the second study,the area between the grilles and cooling package was sealed and inlet ducts were created to control the flow from the grilles to the cooling package. When just adding inlet ducts, the mass flow through the grilles was decreased, but the mass flow through the cooling package was increased due to less separation of the air, which lead to a drag reduction of 0.2%. Other design implementations was to reshape the wheelhouse outlets, therefore a wheelhouse outlet duct was designed. The ducts purpose was to lead the air out of the wheelhouse and behind the tire and exit the vehicle parallel to the free stream flow. The wheelhouse duct is most effective and decreases the drag force by 0.7%. An air duct was also designed to lead the flow after the cooling package fan to the outlets. The ducts purpose was to prevent the air from loosing in energy when rising to the roof of the engine bay, the duct compresses the air and leads it efficiently over the engine with a drag force decrease on 0.3%. The inlet duct, wheelhouse duct and after fan duct was all put together to a thesis design. Due to the higher mass flow through the cooling package the upper grille could be sealed by 9.9% and still allow the same mass flow through the cooling package as for the SUV A. The thesis design for improved cooling air management allowed a decrease of drag force timesarea by 0.9%. In conclusion there is much that can be done to improve the cooling air drag. It is most favorable to have a sealed volume with inlet air ducts before the cooling package, have outtakes aligned with the free stream flow, minimize cooling air to escape through the wheelhouse outlets and to minimize the height of the engine bay as much as possible.

Healthcare systems face many challenges that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Overcoming these challenges can be very difficult in part because of their complexity. Predicting all the possible effects that improvement attempts may create is difficult and high-quality decision support material is difficult to obtain. System dynamics modeling and simulation is a technology that has been applied for some time within the healthcare domain in order to assist the decision-making process. This technology has gained increased interest in the domain over the past decade. This project analyses the application of system dynamics modeling to a specific problem in the healthcare sector, namely that of frequent attenders to the emergency department. A literature review is performed to extract suggestions that could be considered when engaged in the process of developing a system dynamics model for managing frequent attenders in healthcare. It has been found that the research on frequent attenders and their management is very heterogeneous and ambiguous making it difficult to draw strong conclusions about the effectiveness of different management strategies. Model builders are forced to turn to other sources for model data. It is also found that system dynamics modeling of frequent attenders has not yet been done. This situation led to the expansion of the search scope to include related modeling research as the basis for suggestion extraction. 65 suggestions are extracted into three broad categories with the limitation of not being strictly specific to the modeling of frequent attenders, but have a more general nature. And although their value is not evaluated, it is hoped that they could contribute as inspiration to certain system dynamics model development endeavors.

Basning är en metod där värme och fukt används för att göra träplastiskt och böjbart. Den traditionella metoden att böja trä är att använda en låda eller ett rör och påföra värme och ånga för att mjuka upp träet inför böjning. Böjningen sker sedan utanför basningslådan. Det här examensarbetet   att basa trä i en påse och genomföra själva böjningen när träet fortfarande finns kvar i ångpåsen. Här beskrivs framtagandet av den flexibla och lättanvända basningspåsen STEAM BAG, från inledande tester, framtagande av böjmall och kompressionsband till utvärdering och jämförelse med traditionell basning. Resultatet av mina tester visa att det är möjligt att förbättra böj metoden traditionell basning med hjälp av ångpåsen då det går att bibehålla värmen och ångan under själva böjningsprocessen.