The relevance of ERTS-1 data to the state of Ohio

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Shared-Use Bus Priority Lanes On City Streets: Case Studies in Design and Management, MTI Report 11-10

This report examines the policies and strategies governing the design and, especially, operations of bus lanes in major congested urban centers. It focuses on bus lanes that operate in mixed traffic conditions; the study does not examine practices concerning bus priority lanes on urban highways or freeways. Four key questions addressed in the paper are: How do the many public agencies within any city region that share authority over different aspects of the bus lanes coordinate their work in designing, operating, and enforcing the lanes? What is the physical design of the lanes? What is the scope of the priority use granted to buses? When is bus priority in effect, and what other users may share the lanes during these times? How are the lanes enforced? To answer these questions, the study developed detailed cases on the bus lane development and management strategies in seven cities that currently have shared-use bus priority lanes: Los Angeles, London, New York City, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, and Sydney. Through the case studies, the paper examines the range of practices in use, thus providing planners and decision makers with an awareness of the wide variety of design and operational options available to them. In addition, the report highlights innovative practices that contribute to bus lanes’ success, where the research findings make this possible, such as mechanisms for integrating or jointly managing bus lane planning and operations across agencies

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis research was undertaken to investigate the impacts of finer rock fragmentation (arising from higher energy blasting) on the unit costs of a hard-rock surface mine. The investigation was carried out at a copper operation in southern Utah, which exploits its deposits by conventional methods, including drilling, blasting, loading, and truck haulage. The run of mine is processed in a three-stage crushing circuit and a two-stage grinding circuit, which feed a flotation plant that produces a copper concentrate. The research was carried out using modeling and simulation techniques. Fifty-five blast designs in total were developed for ore and waste units, with energy inputs ranging from 100 kcal/st to 400 kcal/st. For each design, fragmentation was predicted using the Kuz-Ram method. Crushing of the predicted ore fragment size distributions was simulated using MODSIMTM. Data from pit face imaging and timed motion studies were collected and analyzed for the influence of fragmentation on shovel and truck productivity. Analyses indicated that fragment size distribution alone does not significantly impact this productivity. From simulation of the crushing circuit, it was found that the impact of differences in the blast-generated fragment distribution on the crusher energy is limited to the primary crusher, where a vast range of feed size distributions are introduced. No such relationships were evident at the secondary and tertiary crushers. Energy savings from increasing blasting intensity proved negligible and would not justify the costs of higher energy blasting. There was no evidence from this work that any beneficial influences of blast-generated fragment size distribution reach the grinding mill. Costs were estimated for drilling, blasting, and crushing, which were the principal unit operations inferred to be affected in some meaningful way by the varying intensities of blast energy input. The research shows that, principally as a result of jaw crusher gape restrictions and the significant unit costs of secondary reduction for both ore and waste, the net of all breakage (primary blast, secondary reduction, and crushing) does reduce to a transient minimum before they begin to ramp up again, thus fitting a classical mine-to-mill curve

New devices for energy harvesting and storage: integrated third generation photovoltaic solar cells and electrochemical double layer capacitors

A worldwide conversion towards renewable energy sources has to be implemented in order to hopefully avoid the irreversible consequences of the global temperature increment caused by the greenhouse gases production. In addition, the current need to benefit from electricity in every moment of daily life, mainly in case of limited access to the electric grid, is forcing the scientific community to an intensive effort towards the production of integrated energy harvesting and storage devices. The topic of this PhD thesis is to investigate and propose innovative solutions for the integration of third generation photovoltaic (PV) cells and electrochemical double layer capacitors (EDLCs), the so-called photo-capacitors. Different photo-capacitor structures have been studied and experimentally fabricated. At first, flexibility was explored, as it is a mandatory requirement to cover non-planar or bendable surfaces, which are more and more common in nowadays portable electronics. Easily scalable fabrication processes have been used for both the harvester and the storage units, employing photopolymer membranes as electrolytes and metallic grids as current collectors and electrodes substrates. For this configuration, the best overall conversion and storage efficiency ever reported for a flexible Dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC)-based photo-capacitor was demonstrated. Subsequently, observing in the literature an evident lack in the exploitation of high voltage photo-capacitors, EDLC electrolytes with broad voltage windows have been examined. These electrolytes allowed to fabricate stable and reliable devices integrating the EDLC with a PV module and not only with a single solar cell, as normally is done. High voltage values, up to 2.5 V, have been obtained employing an ionic liquid electrolyte (Pyr14TFSI) or –alternatively- a solid state electrolyte (PEO-Pyr14TFSI) for storage section fabrication. Moreover, novel electrolyte mixtures of organic solvents and ionic liquids with good physical and electrochemical properties have been employed with the aim to increase energy density and voltage with respect to commercial EDLCs. Finally, a novel polymer-based platform has been suggested for the fabrication of an innovative “two-electrodes” self-powered device. The multifunctional polymeric layer, made of two poly(ethylene glycol)-based sections separated by a perfluorinated barrier, was obtained by oxygen-inhibited UV-light crosslinking procedure. For the energy harvesting section, one side of the polymeric layer was adapted to enable iodide/triiodide diffusion in a DSSC, while the other side empowered sodium/chloride ions diffusion and was used for on-board charge storage. The resulting photo-capacitor results in a planar architecture appreciably simplified with respect to other recently proposed solutions and is definitely more easily exploitable in low power electronics

Corrélation des profils d'utilisateurs dans les réseaux sociaux : méthodes et applications

The proliferation of social networks and all the personal data that people share brings many opportunities for developing exciting new applications. At the same time, however, the availability of vast amounts of personal data raises privacy and security concerns.In this thesis, we develop methods to identify the social networks accounts of a given user. We first study how we can exploit the public profiles users maintain in different social networks to match their accounts. We identify four important properties – Availability, Consistency, non- Impersonability, and Discriminability (ACID) – to evaluate the quality of different profile attributes to match accounts. Exploiting public profiles has a good potential to match accounts because a large number of users have the same names and other personal infor- mation across different social networks. Yet, it remains challenging to achieve practically useful accuracy of matching due to the scale of real social networks. To demonstrate that matching accounts in real social networks is feasible and reliable enough to be used in practice, we focus on designing matching schemes that achieve low error rates even when applied in large-scale networks with hundreds of millions of users. Then, we show that we can still match accounts across social networks even if we only exploit what users post, i.e., their activity on a social networks. This demonstrates that, even if users are privacy conscious and maintain distinct profiles on different social networks, we can still potentially match their accounts. Finally, we show that, by identifying accounts that correspond to the same person inside a social network, we can detect impersonators.La prolifération des réseaux sociaux et des données à caractère personnel apporte de nombreuses possibilités de développement de nouvelles applications. Au même temps, la disponibilité de grandes quantités de données à caractère personnel soulève des problèmes de confidentialité et de sécurité. Dans cette thèse, nous développons des méthodes pour identifier les différents comptes d'un utilisateur dans des réseaux sociaux. Nous étudions d'abord comment nous pouvons exploiter les profils publics maintenus par les utilisateurs pour corréler leurs comptes. Nous identifions quatre propriétés importantes - la disponibilité, la cohérence, la non-impersonabilite, et la discriminabilité (ACID) - pour évaluer la qualité de différents attributs pour corréler des comptes. On peut corréler un grand nombre de comptes parce-que les utilisateurs maintiennent les mêmes noms et d'autres informations personnelles à travers des différents réseaux sociaux. Pourtant, il reste difficile d'obtenir une précision suffisant pour utiliser les corrélations dans la pratique à cause de la grandeur de réseaux sociaux réels. Nous développons des schémas qui obtiennent des faible taux d'erreur même lorsqu'elles sont appliquées dans les réseaux avec des millions d'utilisateurs. Ensuite, nous montrons que nous pouvons corréler les comptes d'utilisateurs même si nous exploitons que leur activité sur un les réseaux sociaux. Ça sa démontre que, même si les utilisateurs maintient des profils distincts nous pouvons toutefois corréler leurs comptes. Enfin, nous montrons que, en identifiant les comptes qui correspondent à la même personne à l'intérieur d'un réseau social, nous pouvons détecter des imitateurs

Enabling alternate fuels for commercial aircraft

The following reports on the past four years of work to examine the feasibility, sustainability and economic viability of developing a renewable, greenhouse-gas-neutral, liquid biofuel for commercial aircraft. The sharp increase in environmental concerns, such as global warming, as well as the volatile price fluctuations of fossil fuels, has ignited a search for alternative transportation fuels. However, commercial aircraft can not use present alternative fuels that are designed for ground transportation. Aircraft also have much longer service lives, are capital intensive to purchase, require a complex refueling infrastructure, and are specifically designed to use petroleum-type liquid jet fuels. Synthetic jet fuel, manufactured using a Fischer-Tropsch process from coal, is currently the only alternative jet fuel commercially available to aviation, but it presently experiences environmental challenges. Biojet fuels are currently not commercially available for aviation, but have the potential to become quite acceptable If passenger growth increases at 5%/year, it appears the only way that the aviation industry can meets its environmental goals of reducing CO2 emissions would be through commercialization of carbon-neutral fuels. This research shows that biojet fuels can be developed that do not compete with food or fresh water resources, will not lead to deforestation and will not cause other adverse environmental or social impacts. The approach of using a “drop in” jet fuel replacement, which would consist of a blend of kerosene and up to 50% biofuel will be possible for use in existing and future aircraft. A 60-80% lifecycle CO2 emission reduction is calculated for the biofuel portion with no performance degradation. New biofuel processing techniques (i.e. hydroprocessing, isomerization & distillation) and next generation feedstock sources (e.g. halophyte and algal biomass) appear to be the best pathways to enable the large scale deployment of sustainable and economically competitive biojet fuels in the near future

Cost-Effective and Sustainable Harvest Methods

Forest biomass is a highly important source of renewable energy in the Baltic Sea Region. Forest harvests produce a huge amount of residues, of which a large share could be used for energy purposes but are currently often left in forests due to economic and ecological reasons. There is a large potential in tackling the increasing demand for renewable energy by increasing the harvest of logging residues and small trees in pre-commercial thinning. This handbook aims to increase production of renewable energy in the Baltic Sea Region by improving the capacity of public authorities, forest and energy agencies, organisations of forest owners and entrepreneurs and forest advisory organisations to promote the harvest and use of logging residues and small trees cut in early thinning. This handbook consists of five chapters to provide an overview of the role of forest bioenergy in the Baltic Sea region countries – Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden. The specific conditions related to each forest growing phase are described from technological, economic, and environmental viewpoints. The handbook provides knowledge on the current harvesting methods in the partner countries and finally recommends best practices for the stakeholders. The aim is to learn about new approaches to the forest bioenergy individually and organisationally