Economic feasibility of small wind turbines for domestic consumers in Egypt based on the new feed-in tariff

This paper provides an overview of the wind power potential at different regions in Egypt, along the Mediterranean and Red Sea, and the Western desert. A further technical and economic assessment is conducted for the electricity generation with 8 different small wind turbines at 17 locations. The annual electricity generation from selected wind turbines is evaluated. The obtained data are presented and discussed investigating the net present value and the payback period analyzing the profitability of selected wind turbines. The dependence of the turbine profitability from the feed-in tariff is specifically addressed

Wave-Packet Scattering off the Kink-Solution

We investigate the propagation of a wave--packet in the $\phi^4$ model. We solve the time-dependent equation of motion for two distinct initial conditions: The wave-packet in a trivial vacuum background and in the background of the kink soliton solution. We extract the scattering matrix from the wave-packet in the kink background at very late times and compare it with the result from static potential scattering in the small amplitude approximation. We vary the size of the initial wave-packet to identify non-linear effects as, for example, the replacement of the center of the kink.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures (from 14 eps files), 4 tables, Int. J. Mod. Phys. A, in prin

Humanitarian intervention: Before and after responsibility to protect (R2P) assessing the impact of R2P

The main topic of this thesis is to tackle the principle of Humanitarian intervention. Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was coined in 2001 as an evolution to the doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention (HI) with the aim to set precautions and conditions to govern the way the international community responds to humanitarian crises. The absence of defined rules or regulations to govern the international community’s response to humanitarian crises has rendered the doctrine of humanitarian intervention perceived as a tool that can be used selectively by major powers to intervene in other countries according to their interests. The case of Kosovo (1999) when NATO forces launched military attacks against the Former Yugoslavian Republic (FYR) without a mandate from the UN Security Council, made it clear that the time was ripe by then for the adoption of a principled framework for humanitarian intervention. This framework was then proposed and coined later by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) and named the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). However, after the launch of R2P (2001) and the adoption of R2P at the UN World Summit (2005), the developments in Libya (2011) and Syria (2011-?) revealed that R2P has not provided substantive change to the pattern of the state reactions to humanitarian crises, political interests remained the dominant factors deciding intervention in case of humanitarian crises before and after R2P The thesis views that the launch of R2P constituted a historical opportunity to promote parameters and conditions for the international community to respond to humanitarian crisis in an automatic way away from any other considerations that could stem from particular interests or rivalry among major powers. However, the pattern of the international intervention in humanitarian crises after the R2P remained problematic. The main hypothesis of the thesis is throughout ages political interests were the dominant motive behind the decision of international intervention in humanitarian crises. Despite the great aspirations that accompanied the adoption of R2P, the pattern of international intervention under humanitarian reasons remained under the effect of the dominance of the political interests as it used to be before the adoption of R2P. The thesis will study different patterns of intervention in different eras before and after the adoption of R2P in order to demonstrate that political interests remained the dominant motive behind the decision of international intervention in humanitarian crises before and after R2P

Perceptions of socioeconomic integration of middle eastern immigrants in Europe : comparing national discourses and subjective experiences

This panel compares the subjective understanding of success and socioeconomic mobility of immigrants from the Middle East in Europe with national discourses of integration. Despite the abundance of research on Middle Eastern migrants in Europe, not much is known about their subjective understanding of their socioeconomic positions and experience with social mobility. Much of the research looks at objective measures such as educational attainment, occupational status, and reported discrimination. Little research has investigated the ways immigrants and their children on ‘define, experience, and perceive mobility and success’ (Zhou et al. 2008, p. 42). This panel investigates the different narratives of incorporation as presented by official media outlets on the one hand, and the immigrant populations on the other. Looking at key factors of incorporation and social mobility including education attainment and school experiences, and occupational status and labour market experiences the papers in this panel highlight the contradictory narratives of othering and the desire to belong, failure and success, and fear and aspirations. The papers focus on case studies from Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark to provide analyses from traditional European destinations to ones that have only recently dealt with new populations among their midst. Despite their disadvantaged position, the papers show that the majority of immigrants and their children perceive of their experiences both in school and labour market as considerable success. At the same time, national discourses of incorporation and integration stress narratives of fear of Islamization and violence as grounds for exclusion and marginalization. Taken together, the papers allow us to conclude the importance of subjective experiences in understanding processes of integration and mobility among immigrants in various societies in Europe. Such subjective experiences challenge official discourses and shed light on host societies’ willingness to accept new generations of immigrants

Dose rate profile inside the spent fuel storage pool in case of full capacity storage

This study aims to evaluate the radiation dose rate distribution inside temporary spent fuel open-pool storage. The storage pool is connected to the main pool via transfer channel to facilitate transporting the spent fuel under water that avoiding radiation dose rising in the working area in the reactor. The storage pool was prepared to store 800 spent fuel elements that considering the maximum capacity of storage. The spent fuel elements in the storage pool have different decay times depending on the times of extraction from the core. Assuming conservatively, that the spent fuels of the 5-years decay time would be stored in the lower rack and the spent fuels, of decay time ranged between 10 days and 5 years, would be stored in the upper rack. The dose rate was profiled in the region above the upper rack using SCALE/MAVRIC code applying adjoint flux calculation as a variance reduction technique. The results show that the dose rate values in the region above the pool surface would be lower than the permissible limits

Radiological performance of hot water layer system in open pool type reactor

AbstractThe paper presents the calculated dose rate carried out by using MicroShield code to show the importance of hot water layer system (HWL) in 22MW open pool type reactor from the radiation protection safety point of view. The paper presents the dose rate profiles over the pool surface in normal and abnormal operations of HWL system. The results show that, in case of losing the hot water layer effect, the radiation dose rate profiles over the pool surface will increase from values lower than the worker permissible dose limits to values very higher than the permissible dose limits

Vehicle Classification For Automatic Traffic Density Estimation

Automatic traffic light control at intersection has recently become one of the most active research areas related to the development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Due to the massive growth in urbanization and traffic congestion, intelligent vision based traffic light controller is needed to reduce the traffi c delay and travel time especially in developing countries as the current automatic time based control is not realistic while sensor-based tra ffic light controller is not reliable in developing countries. Vision based traffi c light controller depends mainly on traffic congestion estimation at cross roads, because the main road junctions of a city are these roads where most of the road-beds are lost. Most of the previous studies related to this topic do not take unattended vehicles into consideration when estimating the tra ffic density or traffi c flow. In this study we would like to improve the performance of vision based traffi c light control by detecting stationary and unattended vehicles to give them higher weights, using image processing and pattern recognition techniques for much e ffective and e ffecient tra ffic congestion estimation