Comparative Analysis Of Systems For Assessing Regional Impacts Of Innovations Applied To Coffee Production

The importance of education, research and extension institutions, can be evaluated from the socio-economic impacts of their investments, capacity building and training of human resources, services rendered to the community and innovations resulting from their research. The knowledge and technologies generated in these institutions need to be transferred to the respective supply chains and increasingly used, to contribute in its development and environmental preservation. The dimensions of the regional impacts of these technologies is relevant to the strengthening of research institutions and to evaluate and update the guidelines of their programs. There are few studies in this area and most of them are linked to the analysis of the role of universities in the growth of the regions where they are located by calculating multipliers for employment, output and income. The evaluation of the environmental, social and economic impacts is even less significant, and emerged from the concept of sustainable development. In Brazil, progress in this area are derived primarily from studies of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) and from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), who developed the systems known respectively Ambitec and ESAC, which in this study on coffee production in Brazil, held by the Agronomic Institute (IAC), are compared mainly from their scope, complexity and cost of implementation. Both consist of the ex-post analysis of the impacts of a particular technology and are built based on criteria and indicators. The application of those two systems indicated that the ESAC system involves a more complex software, and quantitative aspects more sophisticated than the Ambitec, and its use requires more intensive training of staff than Ambitec. A major difficulty of the analysis of impact assessments is to isolate the individual effects of technologies, effects resulting from their interactions with technologies developed by other R & D institutions, or even imported. The ability of the researcher to apply the questionnaires may reduce this problem. But the system ESAC presents an important advantage over the Ambitec because it considers two very important aspects for the analysis of impacts: the impacts resulting from the interactions between different technologies and the time elapsed between the development of technology and its adoption by the productive sector

Consistent Automation Solutions for Electrohydraulic Drives in Times of Industry 4.0

Electrohydraulic drives are primarily used whenever a low power/weight ratio, a compact build and/or large forces are required for individual applications. These drives are often used together with electric drive technology in machines. However, in terms of automation, unlike electric drives, electrohydraulic drives are still largely connected via analog interfaces and centralized closed control loops today. To compensate for this competitive disadvantage of hydraulic drive technology and, at the same time, significantly enhance its performance and diagnostics capability, a consistent automation solution has been developed that can be configured for both centralized and decentralized solutions. This contribution firstly gives an overview over this complete solution already available and its classification in the automation world. In a second step, the subset of decentralized drive solutions contained therein is presented in more detail and their benefits are explained on the basis of some exemplary applications

Unintended sprouts as additional resource for pathogen-free seed potato (Solanum tuberosum) propagation

Unintended sprouting of potato tubers (Solanum tuberosum) occurs within the professional production chain during transportation or storage due to the break of dormancy by changing environmental conditions. The sprouting of high-quality seed potatoes, for example, results in huge amounts of sprouts which complicate the planting process and are, therefore, manually removed and discarded. However, such sprouts can be very useful and sustainable when used as propagation material, helping to avoid losses of seed potatoes and increasing productivity per individual seed potato tuber

Gephyrin Selective Intrabodies as a New Strategy for Studying Inhibitory Receptor Clustering

The microtubule-binding protein gephyrin is known to play a pivotal role in targeting and clustering postsynaptic inhibitory receptors. Here, the Intracellular Antibodies Capture Technology (IATC) was used to select two single-chain antibody fragments or intrabodies, which, fused to nuclear localization signals (NLS), were able to efficiently and selectively remove gephyrin from glycine receptor (GlyR) clusters. Co-transfection of NLS-tagged individual intrabodies with gephyrin-enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) in HEK 293 cells revealed a partial relocalization of gephyrin aggregates onto the nucleus or in the perinuclear area. When expressed in cultured neurons, these intrabodies caused a significant reduction in the number of immunoreactive GlyR clusters, which was associated with a decrease in the peak amplitude of glycine-evoked whole cell currents as assessed with electrophysiological experiments. Hampering protein function at a posttranslational level may represent an attractive alternative for interfering with gephyrin function in a more spatially localized manner

TECHNO-ECONOMIC INVESTIGATION OF DIFFERENT ALTERNATIVES OF IMPROVING SIMPLE GAS TURBINE INTEGRATION OPTIONS

This study investigated the effect of integrating various models proposed to improve a simple gas turbine power plant. A computer program was developed in Matlab software was used to simulate the performance parameters. The energy and exergy analysis of the plant was carried out. The energy and exergy analysis result revealed that both energy and exergy efficiency of plant is low as a result three improvement options were considered. They include Model 1: reducing inlet air cooling (IAC) of the compressor by using the wasted energy in the natural gas pressure drop station. Model 2: recovering wasted energy in the exhaust through heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) and injecting steam into the combustion chamber and lastly Model 3: by combining the two methods. The result showed that among the three methods of improving the plant investigated Model 3 was found to boost power output of the plant from 28.3 MW to 78.4 MW while the thermal and exergetic efficiency improved by 25.5 and 23.6% respectively. Furthermore, from economic and environmental point of view, the lowest levelized cost of electricity as well as the specific emissions was observed in Model 3. Consequently, Model 3 is selected as the best option in improving the simple gas turbine.  http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/njt.v36i3.2