Biomass conversion into forms of energy is receiving current attention because of environmental, energy and agricultural concerns. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the environmental, energy, economic, and technological aspects of using a form of biomass, switchgrass (panicum virgatum), as a partial or complete replacement for coal in power generation and cogeneration systems. To examine the effects of such a substitution, an environmental biocomplexity approach is used, wherein the agricultural, technological, economic, and environmental factors are addressed. In particular, lifecycle analysis (LCA) and a three-dimensional integrated economic, energy and environmental analysis is employed. The effectiveness of alternate technologies for switchgrass preparation, harvest and use in terms of greenhouse gas impact, cost and environmental implications is examined. Also, different scenarios of cofiring and biomass preparation pathways are investigated. Optimization of the total biomass power generation cost with minimum greenhouse gas effect is undertaken using mathematical programming for various alternate competitive biomass processing pathways. As a byproduct of this work a generic tool to optimize the cost and greenhouse gas emissions for allocation of fuel sources to the power generating sinks is developed. Further, this work discusses the sensitivity of the findings to varied cofiring ratios, coal prices, hauling distances, per acre yields, etc. Besides electricity generation in power plants, another viable alternative for reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs) is the utilization of biomass in conjunction with combined heat and power (CHP) in the process industries. This work addresses the utilization of biowaste or biomass source in a processing facility for CHP. A systematic algebraic procedure for targeting cogeneration potential ahead of detailed power generation network design is presented. The approach presented here effectively utilizes the biomass and biowaste sources as external fuel, and matches it with the use and dispatch of fuel sources within the process, heating and non-heating steam demands, and power generation. The concept of extractable energy coupled with flow balance via cascade diagram has been used as a basis to construct this approach. The work also discusses important economic factors and environmental policies required for the cost-effective utilization of biomass for electricity generation and CHP.

This research examines the relationship between the use of communication technologies offered by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the religiosity of its young adult members by studying how young adult Latter-day Saints use the communication technologies offered by the Church, whether those communication technologies support or enhance the faith of those members, and what effects communication technologies have on religious beliefs or behaviors. Online survey results and follow-up interview responses indicate that with the exception of social media, active young adult members are utilizing the religious communication technologies offered by the Church, and they do so primarily to support and enhance their own religiosity. The ease of access to scripture and Church publications facilitates gospel learning and study, and the most common communication technologies used for this purpose are LDS.org, the official website of the Church, and the LDS Gospel Library for mobile devices. An overview of the communication technologies the Church offers is provided, and a discussion of Church direction regarding technology is given. / text

Τα τελευταία χρόνια δίνεται μεγάλη έμφαση στην ανάπτυξη ηλεκτρικών συστημάτων φιλικών προς το περιβάλλον. Στην κατεύθυνση αυτή πραγματοποιείται προοδευτική αντικατάσταση συστημάτων συμβατικών πηγών ενέργειας (όπως το πετρέλαιο) με νέα ανανεώσιμων. Σε αυτή την εργασία έχει μελετηθεί, με την βοήθεια του προγράμματος προσομοίωσης – βελτιστοποίησης HOMER, η λειτουργία διαφόρων αυτόνομων ηλεκτρικών συστημάτων με στόχο την κάλυψη των ηλεκτρικών αναγκών (φορτίου) μιας μικρής κοινότητας. Ως περιοχή μελέτης έχει επιλεγεί η Χούλου, μια κοινότητα που βρίσκεται στην Πάφο της Κύπρου. Η Χούλου κατοικείται όλο το χρόνο. Σε αυτή τη περιοχή, κατά την τουριστική περίοδο, το καλοκαίρι, παρατηρείται απότομη αύξηση σε απαιτήσεις φορτίου. Τα δεδομένα έχουν συλλεχθεί από την Αρχή Ηλεκτρισμού Κύπρου (Α.Η.Κ.). Η μελέτη διεξήχθη αρχικά με βάση το υπάρχον εγκατεστημένο σύστημα και έπειτα για τρία εναλλακτικά σχέδια – προτάσεις που βασίζονται σε αντικατάσταση συμβατικών με ανανεώσιμες πηγές ενέργειας. Οι συνδυασμοί είναι οι εξής: α) Προϋπάρχον σύστημα (Ντίζελ), β) Φωτοβολταϊκά - Ντίζελ - Μπαταρίες, γ) Ανεμογεννήτρια - Ντίζελ - Μπαταρίες, δ) Ανεμογεννήτρια - Φωτοβολταϊκά – Μπαταρίες. Ακολούθως, παρουσιάζεται μια εκτενής αναφορά του προγράμματος HOMER Οι τρεις βασικές λειτουργίες, του προγράμματος είναι η προσομοίωση, η βελτιστοποίηση και η ανάλυση ευαισθησίας. Τα αποτελέσματα της προσομοίωσης προκύπτουν με βάση το χαμηλότερο συνολικό καθαρό κόστος (Net Present Cost - NPC). Στο τελευταίο μέρος παρουσιάζονται τα αποτελέσματα της προσομοίωσης. Τα ηλιακά και αιολικά δεδομένα της εξεταζόμενης περιοχής εισάγονται αυτόματα στο πρόγραμμα και έχουν ως πηγή πληροφοριών την NASA. Τα είδη των ανεμογεννητριών, των φωτοβολταϊκών πάνελ, των μετατροπέων, των μπαταριών και των γεννητριών καθώς και τα χρηματοοικονομικά στοιχεία που συγκεντρώθηκαν για την εκτέλεση των προσομοιώσεων προήλθαν από εταιρείες της Κύπρου. Τέλος, γίνεται μια σύγκριση μεταξύ των αποτελεσμάτων που λαμβάνονται, με στόχο την εξεύρεση του βέλτιστου συνδυασμού που θα ταιριάζει στην περιοχή, με βασικά κριτήρια το συνολικό κόστους της επένδυσης, το πλεόνασμα της ηλεκτρικής ενέργειας, την ποσότητα των ρύπων που εκπέμπονται στο περιβάλλον και την ετήσια παραγωγή της ηλεκτρικής ενέργειας σε kWh . / Nowadays there is great emphasis on building environmentally friendly electric systems by replacing the conventional energy sources with renewable. In this project, the function of various autonomous systems has been studied, to cover the electric load requirements of a small community using HOMER simulation program. Study area has been chosen Choulou, a community located in Paphos (Cyprus). The Choulou inhabited all year round. It is observed sudden increase in load requirements during the summer months due to the tourist season. Data have been collected from E.A.C. (Electricity Authority of Cyprus). The study was conducted for the existing installed system in the region as well as three alternative designs of this based on renewable energy sources. The combinations are the following: Primary installed System-Diesel System, Photovoltaic – Diesel System- Batteries, Wind Turbine- Diesel System- Batteries, Wind Turbine –Photovoltaic – Batteries Subsequently is presented an extensive report of HOMER program. The three main functions, incurred by HOMER, are the simulation, optimization and sensitivity analysis which are evidential in this work. The simulation results in this work are based on the lowest total net cost (NPC). In the last part, we present the HOMER simulations results. The solar and wind data of the area examined is granted by NASA sources and are automatically inserted in the program. The types of wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, batteries inverters and generators as well as the financial item are setted as data on the program to perform the simulations which were gathered by Cyprus companies. Finally, a comparison is made between the obtained results by the aim of finding the optimal combination of the region, with essential criteria overall the investment cost, the surplus electricity, the quantity of pollutants emitted into the environment and the annual production of electricity in kWh.

This thesis looks to techno music, and subsequently to the DJ, as models for a way of understanding urban spatial ecology. In its compositional use of rhythm to create a sense of musical space punctuated by time, the DJ’s act of mixing audio in performance is akin to the design process: architects similarly do well to observe and acknowledge the rhythm of city life, history, climate, geology, and to mould their dynamic into an appropriate spatial interface. By aligning aspects of documentation and process with DJ methods, the thesis translates the city’s various rhythms to produce responsive, intuitive architecture. A proposal for a built intervention on a former rail yard in central Halifax, Canada, the architectural response seeks to mix aspects of the city into the site, creating a multivalent graft between military facilities and civilian neighborhoods.

Energy security is probably one of the most challenging issues around the world. Therefore, the focus on methods of decreasing energy consumption and consequently its associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is intensified by policy decision makers. Residential buildings are one of the potential sectors that can reduce its energy consumption in various ways, such as: improving thermal characteristics of the building, using more energy efficient appliances and using renewable energy resources. Among these methods, integration of solar technologies to buildings provides one of the substantial opportunities for reducing energy consumption and the associated GHG emissions in Canada’s residential sector. Therefore, this research work was conducted to assess the impact of solar technologies and solar technology integration strategies on the end-use energy consumption and the associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Canadian residential sector by using a new state-of-the-art end-use energy and GHG emissions model of the Canadian residential housing stock. The new Canadian residential end-use energy and emissions model that is used in this project incorporates a 17,000 house database developed using the latest data available from the Energuide for Houses database, Statistics Canada housing surveys, and other available housing databases, and utilizes an advanced building energy simulation program as its simulation engine. A new neural network methodology is incorporated into the model to estimate the socio-economic and demographic dependencies of the energy consumption of discretionary end-uses such as appliances, lighting and domestic hot water, while a new approach is used to incorporate occupancy, appliance, lighting and domestic hot water load profiles into the model. A new method is used to calculate the GHG emissions from electricity consumption used in the residential sector based on the actual electrical generation fuel mix and the marginal fuel used in each province as a function of time of the year. Each solar technology is added to the eligible houses to examine the interrelated effects of integrated solar technologies and practices on the housing stock. The objective is to conduct realistic assessments of the cost effectiveness, energy savings and GHG emission reduction benefits of integrated solar technologies for the entire Canadian housing stock (CHS) as well as for different regions, house type, and fuel types. The integrated solar technologies and practices that are assessed include passive solar with added thermal storage and motorized blinds, solar DHW system, and photovoltaic electricity and heat generation systems. This project provides a comprehensive techno-economic and emissions assessment of integrated solar technologies and practices, and will be useful for developing national and regional policies and strategies related with integrating solar energy into the residential sector.

No description available.

“Connected society” where everything and everyone are connected at any time and on any location brings new challenges for the network operators. This leads to the need of upgrading the transport networks as the segment of Internet infrastructure connecting the fixed users and mobile base stations to the core/aggregation in order to provide high sustainable bandwidth, as well as supporting a massive number of connected devices. To do this, operators need to change the way that access networks are currently deployed. The future access network technologies will need to support very high capacity and very long distances, which are the inherited characteristics of optical transmission. Hence, optical fiber technology is recognized as the only future proof technology for broadband access. Capacity upgrade in the access networks can lead to a huge capacity demand in the backbone network. One promising solution to address this problem, is to keep the local traffic close to the end users as much as possible, and prevent unnecessary propagation of this type of traffic through the backbone. In this way, operators would be able to expand their access network without the significant capacity upgrade in the higher aggregation layers. Motivated by this need, a comprehensive evaluation of optical access networks is carried out in this thesis regarding ability of accommodating local traffic and amount of possible saving in the backbone by implementing locality awareness schemes. Meanwhile, next generation optical access (NGOA) networks have to provide high capacity at low cost while fulfilling the increasing reliability requirements of future services and customers. Therefore, finding cost-efficient and reliable alternative for future broadband access is one of the most important contributions of this thesis. We analyzed the tradeoff between the cost needed to deploy backup resources and the reliability performance improvement obtained by the proposed protection mechanism. Among different NGOA architectures, hybrid time and wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (TWDM PON) is considered as a proper candidate providing high capacity and large coverage. Therefore, this approach is further analyzed and several tailored protection schemes with high flexibility are proposed to statisfy different requirements from the residential and business users in the same PON.  The work carried out in the thesis has proved that TWDM PON can also offer high reliability performance while keeping the network expenditures at an acceptable level. Considering some other advantages such as low power consumption and high flexibility in resource allocation of this architecture, it has high potential to be the best candidate for NGOA networks.  Moreover, new deployments of radio access networks supporting the increasing capacity demand of mobile users lead to the upgrade of the backhaul segment as a part of broadband access infrastructure. Hence, this thesis also contributes with a comprehensive techno-economic evaluation methodology for mobile backhaul. Several technologies are investigated in order to find the most cost-efficient solution for backhauling the high capacity mobile networks.  Finally, a PON-based mobile backhaul with high capacity and low latency has been proposed for handling coordinated multipoint transmission systems in order to achieve high quality of experience for mobile users. / <p>QC 20150320</p>

The constantly growing demand for energy and the consequent depletion of fossil fuels have led to a drive for energy that is environmentally friendly, efficient and sustainable. A viable source with the most potential of adhering to the criteria is nuclear-produced hydrogen. The hybrid sulphur cycle (HyS) is the proposed electrothermochemical process that can produce the energy carrier, hydrogen. The HyS consists of two unit operations, namely the electrolyzer and the decomposition reactor, that decomposes water into hydrogen and oxygen. A techno-economic evaluation of the technology is needed to prove the commercial potential of the cycle. This research project focuses on determining the hybrid sulphur cycle’s recommended operating parameter range that will support economic viability whilst maintaining a high efficiency. This is done by comparing the results of an evaluation of four case studies, all operating under different conditions. The technical evaluation of the research project is executed using the engineering tool Aspen PlusTM. The models used to achieve accurate results were OLI Mixed Solvent Electrolyte, oleum data package for use with Aspen PlusTM, which provides an accurate representation of the H2SO4 properties, and ELECNRTL to provide an accurate representation of H2SO4 at high temperature conditions. This evaluation provides insight into the efficiency of the process as well as the operating conditions that deliver the highest efficiency. The economic evaluation of the research project determines the hydrogen production costs for various operating conditions. These evaluations provide a recommended operating parameter range for the HyS to obtain high efficiency and economic viability. / Thesis (M.Ing. (Nuclear Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

The constantly growing demand for energy and the consequent depletion of fossil fuels have led to a drive for energy that is environmentally friendly, efficient and sustainable. A viable source with the most potential of adhering to the criteria is nuclear-produced hydrogen. The hybrid sulphur cycle (HyS) is the proposed electrothermochemical process that can produce the energy carrier, hydrogen. The HyS consists of two unit operations, namely the electrolyzer and the decomposition reactor, that decomposes water into hydrogen and oxygen. A techno-economic evaluation of the technology is needed to prove the commercial potential of the cycle. This research project focuses on determining the hybrid sulphur cycle’s recommended operating parameter range that will support economic viability whilst maintaining a high efficiency. This is done by comparing the results of an evaluation of four case studies, all operating under different conditions. The technical evaluation of the research project is executed using the engineering tool Aspen PlusTM. The models used to achieve accurate results were OLI Mixed Solvent Electrolyte, oleum data package for use with Aspen PlusTM, which provides an accurate representation of the H2SO4 properties, and ELECNRTL to provide an accurate representation of H2SO4 at high temperature conditions. This evaluation provides insight into the efficiency of the process as well as the operating conditions that deliver the highest efficiency. The economic evaluation of the research project determines the hydrogen production costs for various operating conditions. These evaluations provide a recommended operating parameter range for the HyS to obtain high efficiency and economic viability. / Thesis (M.Ing. (Nuclear Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Distributed mobile conversion facilities using either fast pyrolysis or torrefaction processes can be used to convert forest residues to more energy dense substances (bio-oil, bio-slurry or torrefied wood) that can be transported as feedstock for bio-fuel facilities. All feedstock are suited for gasification, which produces syngas that can be used to synthesise petrol or diesel via Fischer-Tropsch reactions, or produce hydrogen via water gas shift reactions. Alternatively, the bio-oil product of fast pyrolysis may be upgraded to produce petrol and diesel, or can undergo steam reformation to produce hydrogen. Implementing a network of mobile facilities reduces the energy content of forest residues delivered to a bio-fuel facility as mobile facilities use a fraction of the biomass energy content to meet thermal or electrical demands. The total energy delivered by bio-oil, bio-slurry and torrefied wood is 45%, 65% and 87% of the initial forest residue energy content, respectively. However, implementing mobile facilities is economically feasible when large transport distances are required. For an annual harvest of 1.717 million m3 (equivalent to 2000 ODTPD), transport costs are reduced to less than 40% of the total levelised delivered feedstock cost when mobile facilities are implemented; transport costs account for up to 80% of feedstock costs for conventional woodchip delivery. Torrefaction provides the lowest cost pathway of delivering a forest residue resource when using mobile facilities. Cost savings occur against woodchip delivery for annual forest residue harvests above 2.25 million m3 or when transport distances greater than 250 km are required. Important parameters that influence levelised delivered costs of feedstock are transport distances (forest residue spatial density), haul cost factors, thermal and electrical demands of mobile facilities, and initial moisture content of forest residues. Relocating mobile facilities can be optimised for lowest cost delivery as transport distances of raw biomass are reduced. The overall cost of bio-fuel production is determined by the feedstock delivery pathway and also the bio-fuel production process employed. Results show that the minimum cost of petrol and diesel production is 0.86 $ litre-1 when a bio-oil feedstock is upgraded. This corresponds to a 2750 TPD upgrading facility requiring an annual harvest of 4.30 million m3. The minimum cost of hydrogen production is 2.92 $ kg-1, via the gasification of a woodchip feedstock and subsequent water gas shift reactions. This corresponds to a 1100 ODTPD facility and requires an annual harvest of 947,000 m3. The levelised cost of bio-fuel strongly depends on the size of annual harvest required for bio-fuel facilities. There are optimal harvest volumes (bio-fuel facility sizes) for each bio-fuel production route, which yield minimum bio-fuel production costs. These occur as the benefits of economies of scale for larger bio-fuel facilities compete against increasing transport costs for larger harvests. Optimal harvest volumes are larger for bio-fuel production routes that use feedstock sourced from mobile facilities, as mobile facilities reduce total transport requirements. / Graduate / 0791 / drbrown@uvic.ca