Unraveling the Historical Economies of Scale and Learning Effects for Desalination Technologies

As a technology develops and matures, both economies of scale and the lessons learned through experience drive down the cost over time. This article analyzes and separates the effects of economies of scale and learning through experience on historical cost reductions for three mature desalination technologies: multi‐effect distillation (MED), multi‐stage flash (MSF) distillation, and reverse osmosis (RO). The analysis suggests that learning has been the dominant driver for cost reductions, with learning rates of 23%, 30%, and 12% for MED, MSF, and RO, respectively, when the effects of scale are removed. The highest influence of economies of scale is found for MED, with an exponential scale coefficient of 0.71 and the largest difference between a traditional or scale‐free estimation of the learning rate. MSF and RO showed smaller differences between the traditional and de‐scaled learning rates (only 3%), pointing at learning as the main factor driving their historical cost reductions. However, a trend break observed over the last 10 years mirrors an exhaustion of the potential for technical improvements, as well as an increasing complexity and nonlinearity of the factors influencing the systems' cost. The findings provide useful data and insights for integrated and economic modeling frameworks, while providing guidance to prevent overestimations of the learning effect due to the confounding influence of economies of scale effects associated to historical unit upscaling processes

Collaborative research and development (R&D) for climate technology transfer and uptake in developing countries: Towards a needs driven approach

While international cooperation to facilitate the transfer and uptake of climate technologies in developing countries is an ongoing part of climate policy conversations, international collaborative R&D has received comparatively little attention. Collaborative R&D, however, could be a potentially important contributor to facilitating the transfer and uptake of climate technologies in developing countries. But the complexities of international collaborative R&D options and their distributional consequences have been given little attention to date. This paper develops a systematic approach to informing future empirical research and policy analysis on this topic. Building on insights from relevant literature and analysis of empirical data based on a sample of existing international climate technology R&D initiatives, three contributions are made. First, the paper analyses the coverage of existing collaborative R&D efforts in relation to climate technologies, highlighting some important concerns, such as a lack of coverage of lower-income countries or adaptation technologies. Second, it provides a starting point for further systematic research and policy thinking via the development of a taxonomic approach for analysing collaborative designs. Finally, it matches characteristics of R&D collaborations against developing countries’ climate technology needs to provide policymakers with guidance on how to Configure R&D collaborations to meet these needs

The cross section minima in elastic Nd scattering: a ``smoking gun'' for three nucleon force effects

Neutron-deuteron elastic scattering cross sections are calculated at different energies using modern nucleon-nucleon interactions and the Tucson-Melbourne three-nucleon force adjusted to the triton binding energy. Predictions based on NN forces only underestimate nucleon-deuteron data in the minima at higher energies starting around 60 MeV. Adding the three-nucleon forces fills up those minima and reduces the discrepancies significantly.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Morphological Analysis, Diffusion, and Patterns of Technological Evolution: Ferrous Casting in France and the FRG

The historiography of technical change has demonstrated that the process of technological diffusion is in itself also a developmental process. In other words, it is in its diffusion throughout the economy that a technology acquires its industrial and economic properties, transforms itself, and widens the initial market in which it was adopted. On the basis of these dynamic properties of the diffusion process, some authors have been hasty in inferring the theoretical impossibility of formal representation, since the objective of the diffusion is not the same at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the process. It appears to us, however, that the interest in a formal representation resides precisely in the possibility of periodizing the diffusion process, with the aid of criteria that can take into account the principal transformations of the technology under consideration. The diffusion process can thus be considered as a series of competitions at given times between a technology A, which is in the middle of a transformation, and other technologies (B, C, and D) with respect to those functions that A is successively able to assume. Generally these successive competitions will occur in ever larger markets as A progressively enlarges its initial functional characteristics. It is therefore possible to interpret the characteristics of the diffusion pattern of a given period on the basis of the manner in which competition developed throughout a previous period

Flexibility in MOFs: Do scalar and group-theoretical counting rules work?

© The Royal Society of Chemistry 2016. We investigate the ability of counting rules drafted from engineering to predict the flexibility or rigidity of bar-and-joint or body-and-joint assemblies representing metal organic frameworks. We show that while scalar counting rules are not reliable, group-theoretical approaches are able to disentangle mechanisms from states of self-stress and to predict the existence of flexible mechanisms. We give several detailed examples of such calculations, highlighting the fact that behind an abstract exterior they are in fact easy to apply and similar to the method used to obtain molecular vibrations. We also correct a slight misinterpretation of the rigidity of IRMOF-1