1,890 research outputs found
UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024
The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp
The Pragmatic Development of a Carbon Management Framework for UK SMEs
The UK's commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050 is challenged by critics citing current government strategies as inadequate, marked by a lack of concrete action and aspirational guidelines. Notably, businesses, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which constitute about half of all business emissions, are pivotal to this goal. Yet, existing policies and standards often neglect the significant role of SMEs, who face barriers such as limited knowledge and resources in implementing carbon management practices.
This thesis explores the development of a novel carbon management framework specifically designed for medium-sized organisations in the UK to address these problems. The research adopts a practical approach through collaboration with an industry partner, facilitating a case study for real-world application.
Adopting a mixed-methods research design grounded in pragmatism, the study commenced with a qualitative study in the form of a focus group. This exploratory phase, critical for understanding SME challenges, yielded rich data revealing key management themes in strategy, energy, and data. The framework design was supported by a materiality assessment and input from key stakeholders on three major iterations. The final framework comprises three phases: establishing a baseline carbon footprint, creating a carbon reduction plan, and strategically implementing this plan. The validation process, conducted at Knowsley Safari, successfully tested the initial two phases but faced constraints in fully assessing the third phase due to time limitations.
While the research achieved its primary aim of developing a novel carbon management framework for SMEs, it encountered limitations, notably in time and the generalisability of findings due to reliance on a single case study. Future research could test the framework across diverse SME settings to establish its broader applicability and effectiveness in aiding the UK's net-zero emission goals
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
UMSL Bulletin 2022-2023
The 2022-2023 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1087/thumbnail.jp
2023-2024 Catalog
The 2023-2024 Governors State University Undergraduate and Graduate Catalog is a comprehensive listing of current information regarding:Degree RequirementsCourse OfferingsUndergraduate and Graduate Rules and Regulation
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The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC
High energy collisions at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produce a large number of particles along the beam collision axis, outside of the acceptance of existing LHC experiments. The proposed Forward Physics Facility (FPF), to be located several hundred meters from the ATLAS interaction point and shielded by concrete and rock, will host a suite of experiments to probe standard model (SM) processes and search for physics beyond the standard model (BSM). In this report, we review the status of the civil engineering plans and the experiments to explore the diverse physics signals that can be uniquely probed in the forward region. FPF experiments will be sensitive to a broad range of BSM physics through searches for new particle scattering or decay signatures and deviations from SM expectations in high statistics analyses with TeV neutrinos in this low-background environment. High statistics neutrino detection will also provide valuable data for fundamental topics in perturbative and non-perturbative QCD and in weak interactions. Experiments at the FPF will enable synergies between forward particle production at the LHC and astroparticle physics to be exploited. We report here on these physics topics, on infrastructure, detector, and simulation studies, and on future directions to realize the FPF’s physics potential
Carbon Capture Storage Implemented On Flexible Power Plants And Their Grid Impacts
The energy grid is under a constant state of evolution from outside factors such as the rise ofrenewable energy in the form of solar and wind generation as well as competing with the changes in weather patterns from climate change leading to significant storms like the arctic event of 2022. Thermal power plants are greatly impacted by these changes. As a significant contributor of CO2 emissions, thermal power plants play an important role in emerging green technology policies to help the efforts of climate change. There is a significant cost associated with this change, however, as thermal plants are some of the cheapest to implement and have provided baseline power supply for decades for both first world countries and especially those still under development. An emerging technology that can bridge the gap between these two ideologies is carbon capture systems, which take the emissions normally emitted to the environment and allow them to be captured for storage later. Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) is not without its tradeoffs though. There is a significant change, of about 15%, in the power generation capability of the plant it is installed on, which can have drastic impacts on a grid already impacted by so many other changes. To combat these difficulties, flexible variations of thermal plants are being brought forth, but the capabilities of these options compared to the traditional is notional. This study used a simulation-based approach to quantify these impacts. The simulations evaluated traditional thermal plants, their flexible counterparts, renewable energy hosting, and the capabilities of both in regard to carbon capture installations. Using results from the developed model, the benefits of pairing flexible plants with dynamic CCS units show that additional renewable energy and load can be hosted, as well as show the limitations that those parameters exhibited
Towards A Practical High-Assurance Systems Programming Language
Writing correct and performant low-level systems code is a notoriously demanding job, even for experienced developers. To make the matter worse, formally reasoning about their correctness properties introduces yet another level of complexity to the task. It requires considerable expertise in both systems programming and formal verification. The development can be extremely costly due to the sheer complexity of the systems and the nuances in them, if not assisted with appropriate tools that provide abstraction and automation.
Cogent is designed to alleviate the burden on developers when writing and verifying systems code. It is a high-level functional language with a certifying compiler, which automatically proves the correctness of the compiled code and also provides a purely functional abstraction of the low-level program to the developer. Equational reasoning techniques can then be used to prove functional correctness properties of the program on top of this abstract semantics, which is notably less laborious than directly verifying the C code.
To make Cogent a more approachable and effective tool for developing real-world systems, we further strengthen the framework by extending the core language and its ecosystem. Specifically, we enrich the language to allow users to control the memory representation of algebraic data types, while retaining the automatic proof with a data layout refinement calculus. We repurpose existing tools in a novel way and develop an intuitive foreign function interface, which provides users a seamless experience when using Cogent in conjunction with native C. We augment the Cogent ecosystem with a property-based testing framework, which helps developers better understand the impact formal verification has on their programs and enables a progressive approach to producing high-assurance systems. Finally we explore refinement type systems, which we plan to incorporate into Cogent for more expressiveness and better integration of systems programmers with the verification process
The future of cosmology? A case for CMB spectral distortions
This thesis treats the topic of CMB Spectral Distortions (SDs), which
represent any deviation from a pure black body shape of the CMB energy
spectrum. As such, they can be used to probe the inflationary, expansion and
thermal evolution of the universe both within CDM and beyond it. The
currently missing observation of this rich probe of the universe makes of it an
ideal target for future observational campaigns. In fact, while the
CDM signal guarantees a discovery, the sensitivity to a wide variety
of new physics opens the door to an enormous uncharted territory. In light of
these considerations, the thesis opens by reviewing the topic of CMB SDs in a
pedagogical and illustrative fashion, aimed at waking the interest of the
broader community. This introductory premise sets the stage for the first main
contribution of the thesis to the field of SDs: their implementation in the
Boltzmann solver CLASS and the parameter inference code MontePython. The
CLASS+MontePython pipeline is publicly available, fast, it includes all sources
of SDs within CDM and many others beyond that, and allows to
consistently account for any observational setup. By means of these numerical
tools, the second main contribution of the thesis consists in showcasing the
versatility and competitiveness of SDs for several cosmological models as well
as for a number of different mission designs. Among others, the results cover
features in the primordial power spectrum, primordial gravitational waves,
non-standard dark matter properties, primordial black holes, primordial
magnetic fields and Hubble tension. Finally, the manuscript is disseminated
with (20) follow-up ideas that naturally extend the work carried out so far,
highlighting how rich of unexplored possibilities the field of CMB SDs still
is. The hope is that these suggestions will become a propeller for further
interesting developments.Comment: PhD thesis. Pedagogical review of theory, experimental status and
numerical tools (CLASS+MontePython) with broad overview of applications.
Includes 20 original follow-up idea
Making Connections: A Handbook for Effective Formal Mentoring Programs in Academia
This book, Making Connections: A Handbook for Effective Formal Mentoring Programs in Academia, makes a unique and needed contribution to the mentoring field as it focuses solely on mentoring in academia. This handbook is a collaborative institutional effort between Utah State University’s (USU) Empowering Teaching Open Access Book Series and the Mentoring Institute at the University of New Mexico (UNM). This book is available through (a) an e-book through Pressbooks, (b) a downloadable PDF version on USU’s Open Access Book Series website), and (c) a print version available for purchase on the USU Empower Teaching Open Access page, and on Amazon
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