The green and blue water footprint of paper products: methodological considerations and quantification

For a hardcopy of this report, printed in the Netherlands, an estimated 200 litres of water have been used. Water is required during different stages in the production process, from growing wood to processing pulp into the final consumer product. Most of the water is consumed in the forestry stage, where water consumption refers to the forest evapotranspiration. The water footprint during the manufacturing processes in the industrial stage consists of evaporation and contamination of ground- and surface water. In this report we assess water requirements for producing paper products using different types of wood and in different parts of the world. We quantify the combined green and blue water footprint of paper by considering the full supply chain; we do not include the grey water footprint in this study. The water footprint of printing and writing paper is estimated to be between 300 and 2600 m3/ton (2-13 litres for an A4 sheet). These figures account for the paper recovery rates as they currently are. The exact amount depends on the sort and origin of the paper used for printing. Without recovery, the global average water footprint of paper would be much larger; by using recovered paper an estimated 40% is saved globally. Further saving can be achieved by increasing the recovery percentages worldwide. For countries with a low recovered paper utilization rate a lot of room for reduction still remains. Some countries such as the Netherlands, Spain and Germany already use a lot of recovered paper. In addition, the global water footprint of paper can be reduced by choosing production sites and wood types that are more water-efficient. The findings presented in this report can be helpful in identifying the opportunities to reduce water footprints of paper consumption. This report also shows that the use of recovered paper may be very helpful in reducing water footprints

Hydrological Foundation as a Basis for a Holistic Environmental Flow Assessment of Tropical Highland Rivers in Ethiopia

The sustainable development of water resources includes retaining some amount of the natural flow regime in water bodies to protect and maintain aquatic ecosystem health and the human livelihoods and wellbeing dependent upon them. Although assessment of environmental flows is now occurring globally, limited studies have been carried out in the Ethiopian highlands, especially studies to understand flow-ecological response relationships. This paper establishes a hydrological foundation of Gumara River from an ecological perspective. The data analysis followed three steps: first, determination of the current flow regime flow indices and ecologically relevant flow regime; second, naturalization of the current flow regime looking at how flow regime is changing; and, finally, an initial exploration of flow linkages with ecological processes. Flow data of Gumara River from 1973 to 2018 are used for the analysis. Monthly low flow occurred from December to June; the lowest being in March, with a median flow of 4.0 m(3) s(-1). Monthly high flow occurred from July to November; the highest being in August, with a median flow of 236 m(3) s(-1). 1-Day low flows decreased from 1.55 m(3) s(-1) in 1973 to 0.16 m(3) s(-1) in 2018, and 90-Day (seasonal) low flow decreased from 4.9 m(3) s(-1) in 1973 to 2.04 m(3) s(-1) in 2018. The Mann-Kendall trend test indicated that the decrease in low flow was significant for both durations at alpha = 0.05. A similar trend is indicated for both durations of high flow. The decrease in both low flows and high flows is attributed to the expansion of pump irrigation by 29 km(2) and expansion of plantations, which resulted in an increase of NDVI from 0.25 in 2000 to 0.29 in 2019. In addition, an analysis of environmental flow components revealed that only four "large floods" appeared in the last 46 years; no "large flood" occurred after 1988. Lacking "large floods" which inundate floodplain wetlands has resulted in early disconnection of floodplain wetlands from the river and the lake; which has impacts on breeding and nursery habitat shrinkage for migratory fish species in Lake Tana. On the other hand, the extreme decrease in "low flow" components has impacts on pin smaller pools. These results serve as the hydrological foundation for continued studies in the Gumara catchment, with the eventual goal of quantifying environmental flow requirements.redators, reducing their mobility and ability to access prey concentrate

Exact Solution of the Zakharov-Shabat Scattering Problem for Doubly-Truncated Multi-Soliton Potentials

Recent studies have revealed that multi-soliton solutions of the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation, as carriers of information, offer a promising solution to the problem of nonlinear signal distortions in fiber optic channels. In any nonlinear Fourier transform based transmission methodology seeking to modulate the discrete spectrum of the multi-solitons, choice of an appropriate windowing function is an important design issue on account of the unbounded support of such signals. Here, we consider the rectangle function as the windowing function for the multi-solitonic signal and provide the exact solution of the associated Zakharov-Shabat scattering problem for the windowed/doubly-truncated multi-soliton potential. This method further allows us to avoid prohibitive numerical computations normally required in order to accurately quantify the effect of time-domain windowing on the nonlinear Fourier spectrum of the multi-solitonic signals. The method devised in this work also applies to general type of signals and may prove to be a useful tool in the theoretical analysis of such systems.Comment: The manuscript is revised for submission to PRE. Also, some typos have been correcte

Stratégie de grille conforme octrée intersectées pour les Applications aux calculs Aéroacoustiques de LAGOON, Modèle de train d'Atterrissage, utilisant le Flow Solver CEDRE non structuré

International audienceAircraft noise is a societal concern and landing gears contribute significantly to the generated noise in approach and landing configurations. Landing gears are characterized by their complex geometry and numerous works have been carried out to develop and validate aeroacoustics simulations to predict the associated noise. Most of them associate a time resolved flow solution, to capture the acoustic sources, to an acoustic computation, to estimate the resulting far field noise. Due to the geometric complexity, unstructured grids are required and may necessitate meticulous work to optimize. In this context, Lattice Boltzmann Methods (LBM) have become popular as they propose to combine automatic grid generation and high CPU efficiency and produced remarked results. The automatic grid generation is facilitated by the use of advanced wall models that do not require resolution of complex details of boundary layer flow, ranging from attached to detached regimes, that are produced by the complex geometries and flow environment of landing gears. Navier-Stokes (NS) solvers on the contrary rely on precise boundary layer solution that require complex grids, even in the unstructured approach, to handle the attached boundary layer regimes, that require strong grid anisotropy, as well as detached regimes and their trailing flow, that require grid isotropy. The grid construction work can therefore become a complex process. The simplification of this process is then an important challenge for industrial applications. The present work details a multi-year effort at ONERA in that direction