Desertification

IPCC SPECIAL REPORT ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND LAND (SRCCL) Chapter 3: Climate Change and Land: An IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystem

Underwater Imaging Using Underwater Vehicle for Subsea Surveillance

This Final Year Project (FYP) focuses on the improvement of images captured through the built-in underwater camera in the HydroView MAX, which is a Remotely-operated Vehicle (ROV) used to perform inspections in subsea environment. Images captured underwater are always degraded due to issues such as light scattering and colour changes. Image-processing algorithms are applied to improve the degraded images so that the images obtained will be enhanced and closer to their true colours for further analysis. These qualities are required so that the degree of corrosion of the underwater pipelines can be estimated with considerable reliability. The estimation of the corrosion degree is made possible by judging on the percentage of corroded surface over the pipeline surface based on the binary image generated

Fast Dust Sand Image Enhancement Based on Color Correction and New Membership Function

Images captured in dusty environments suffering from poor visibility and quality. Enhancement of these images such as sand dust images plays a critical role in various atmospheric optics applications. In this work, proposed a new model based on Color Correction and new membership function to enhance san dust images. The proposed model consists of three phases: correction of color shift, removal of haze, and enhancement of contrast and brightness. The color shift is corrected using a new membership function to adjust the values of U and V in the YUV color space. The Adaptive Dark Channel Prior (A-DCP) is used for haze removal. The stretching contrast and improving image brightness are based on Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE). The proposed model tests and evaluates through many real sand dust images. The experimental results show that the proposed solution is outperformed the current studies in terms of effectively removing the red and yellow cast and provides high quality and quantity dust images

Optimisation of solvolysis for recycling carbon fibre reinforced composites

Solvolysis processes have been used to degrade the resin of two different varieties of epoxy based carbon fibre reinforced composite (CFRC) materials. A degradation of up to 98% has been achieved when processing material at a temperature of 320 °C using a supercritical solvent mixture of acetone and water. Increasing the processing time from 1 to 2 hours shows an increase in the degradation of only 10% and there does not appear to be any benefit in processing the material beyond this time. Due to the batch conditions used, it is necessary to rinse the fibres with acetone after processing to remove remaining organic residue. Washing the fibres at supercritical batch conditions, however, does not efficiently remove the residue compared to a simple hand washing with acetone. Shredding the sample prior to processing also does not have a significant effect. The process investigated requires 19 MJ.kg-1 of fibres recovered and, since the process has not yet been optimised, shows strong potential for future development especially since it allows for the recovery and reuse of organic resinous products