Proper disposal of industrial brine has been a critical environmental challenge. Driven by the even-tightening environment protection regulations, the Zero-Liquid-Discharge (ZLD) has gradually become mandatory option for brine disposal, but its application is limited by the intensive energy consumption. The recent development of solar crystallizer provides a new strategy to achieve ZLD brine disposal. However, the research on solar crystallizer, employing photothermal material to convert solar energy to heat for interfacial brine evaporation and crystallization, is still at the early stage. This dissertation thoroughly investigated the solar crystallizer-based ZLD technology in a broad scientific and application context. The scaling formation while treating real brine, which has been the major barrier to the application of solar crystallizer, was confirmed first with a solar crystallizer device. With a rational designed anti-scaling mechanism, the scaling-free crystallization behavior and stable high water evaporation rate of 2.42 kg m-2 h-1 was achieved when treating real seawater brine. After verifying the feasibility of solar crystallizer towards real brine treatment, its performance was further improved by integrating convective airflow, which provided considerable environmental energy for water evaporation. Both experiment results and COMSOL simulation results confirmed that the maximum environmental energy harvesting can be achieved with the proper size of solar crystallizer. At last, this dissertation pioneered a novel concept of integrating adsorption process into solar crystallizer for simultaneously ZLD brine treatment and potassium extraction. Owing to the special ion concentration behavior of solar crystallizer, the adsorption capacity and selectivity coefficient of absorbent was enhanced by 19.5% and 48.8%, respectively, comparing with traditional bulk adsorption. This dissertation potentially unlocks a new generation of ZLD technology with low carbon footprint and source recovery. More research efforts will be inspired on its applications in real scenarios.

We introduce Domain Aware Continual Zero-Shot Learning (DACZSL), the task of visually recognizing images of unseen categories in unseen domains sequentially. We created DACZSL on top of the DomainNet dataset by dividing it into a sequence of tasks, where classes are incrementally provided on seen domains during training and evaluation is conducted on unseen domains for both seen and unseen classes. We also proposed a novel Domain-Invariant CZSL Network (DIN), which outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models that we adapted to DACZSL setting. We adopt a structure-based approach to alleviate forgetting knowledge from previous tasks with a small per-task private network in addition to a global shared network. To encourage the private network to capture the domain and task-specific representation, we train our model with a novel adversarial knowledge disentanglement setting to make our global network task-invariant and domain-invariant over all the tasks. Our method also learns a class-wise learnable prompt to obtain better class-level text representation, which is used to represent side information to enable zero-shot prediction of future unseen classes. Our code and benchmarks are made available at https://zero-shot-learning.github.io/daczsl.

Content: It is acknowledged that conventional chrome tanning in leather processing discharges significant amounts of chromium, dissolved solids and chlorides. The recycling technology is one of the effective solutions to reduce the environmental impact of chrome tanning waste water at source. In this work, a novel closed recycling technology of chrome tanning wastewater was applied in the tanning process of the goat skins at a pilot scale level. The properties of chrome tanning liquors obtained by the recycling technology and the resultant crust were analyzed. The results show that this close recycling process works well. The contents of Cr2O3, total organic carbon, ammonia nitrogen and chloride ion in the waste water tend to accumulate with the increase of recycling times, and finally reach a balance after 5 times of recycling. The obtained leather sample is full, soft and having a shrinkage temperature comparable to that of conventional chrome tanned leather. SEM images indicate that the resulting leather samples by this recycling technology show fine and clean grain and well-dispersed fibrils. TG and DSC results show that the thermal stability of wet blue leathers tanned by the circular process are similar to those tanned by conventional chrome tanning process. Compared with conventional chrome tanning technology, water, salt and chrome tanning agent are saved in this process, and the zero emission of chrome tanning wastewater is realized. The cleaner production technology exhibits promising application prospect for its economic and environmental benefits. Take-Away: 1. A novel closed recycling technology of chrome tanning wastewater was applied in the tanning process of the goat skins at a pilot scale level. 2. The chrome tanning liquors obtained by the recycling technology and the resultant crust were analyzed. 3. Water, Sodium chloride and chrome tanning agent are saved by the closed recycling technology, and the zero emission of chrome tanning wastewater is realized.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第23548号 / 情博第778号 / 新制||情||132(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科通信情報システム専攻 / (主査)教授 湊 真一, 教授 山本 章博, 准教授 川原 純 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

This study investigates why some firms have no debt in their capital structure despite the potential benefits of leverage. A logistic regression analysis is used to examine the impact of firm-specific characteristics on a firm’s propensity to have zero leverage. The validity of five theoretical explanations for the zero-leverage phenomenon are examined based on how the theories predict characteristics to affect a firm’s propensity to be unlevered. Analysing a new sample of Swedish firms listed on Nasdaq Stockholm in 2005-2018, I show that on average 14.2% of all firms are unlevered. The regression results suggest that the phenomenon of zero-leverage firms can be explained by a combination of several theories. Some firms seem forced to follow zero-leverage policies due to credit rationing by lenders. Others appear to be deliberately debt-free either because they have low needs of external financing or because they strategically want to avoid debt. The study’s main findings for zero-leverage firms are also robust to firms with very low debt (book leverage less than 5%).

The zero forcing number is a graph parameter first introduced as a tool for solving the minimum rank problem, which is: Given a simple, undirected graph G, and a field F, let S(F,G) denote the set of all symmetric matrices A=[a_{ij}] with entries in F such that a_{ij} doess not equal 0 if and only if ij is an edge in G. Find the minimum possible rank of a matrix in S(F,G). It is known that the zero forcing number Z(G) provides an upper bound for the maximum nullity of a graph. I investigate properties of the zero forcing number, including its behavior under various graph operations.

The doctoral thesis proposes a synchronization event detection method suitable for establishing a common time base across devices using power-line communication. The technique facilitates the creation of a synchronization procedure for smart grid terminal devices, thus bringing to the low-voltage segment new functionalities already known from the higher voltage levels of the distribution network. High-precision, zero-cross line voltage detection was employed as the synchronization event. The use of the PLL (phase-locked loop) was considered and analyzed as a potentially applicable option; however, such a solution proved to be insufficiently robust against interference. Further, an FFT-based approach was designed and reviewed. The technique performs zero-cross detection, but only for the fundamental harmonic component that remains the same across the entire network. The influence of incoherent sampling on the FFT, too, was tested during the development of the method; in this context, coherent sampling was found to constitute an essential prerequisite for accurate detection as it allows us to eliminate the spectral leakage error. The impact of an AD converter on the detection accuracy was also evaluated. The proposed approach ensures the accuracy required for all common measurements and operations to improve the production, distribution, and consumption of electricity through smart grids.

In 2018, Raul Matsushita, Donald Pianto, Bernardo B. De Andrade, Andre Can§ado & Sergio Da Silva published a paper titled âTouchard distributionâ, which presented a model that is a two-parameter extension of the Poisson distribution. This model has its normalizing constant related to the Touchard polynomials, hence the name of this model. This diploma thesis is concerned with the properties of the Touchard distribution for which delta is known. Two asymptotic tests based on two different statistics were carried out for comparison in a Touchard model with two independent samples, supported by simulations in R.

Presented diploma paper named “Proposal of Communication Strategy“deals with an analysis of university students and suitable media for targeting. The first part is focused on description of the latest knowledge and trends in this field. In the second part the current media market analysis, analysis of product for which is communication strategy designated for and analysis of university students as target group. The main part of this study represents a suggestion of alternative communication channels which are part of communication strategy. A case study concerning executed campaigns targeted to students follows.

This master’s thesis analyses Kalina cycle, a power cycle where ammonia – water solution is used as a working fluid. The first part of this study introduces us to the Kalina cycle, presents its advantages and disadvantages, characteristics of the working fluid and its applications. Second section concerns with the method of cycle design and describes the calculation model made in this thesis. The calculation model is attached in a separate .XLSM file. The third part shows calculation of the cycle for given parameters, determination of cycle efficiency and main proportions of the thermal turbine. In the conclusion are the interpretations of the calculations results.