A more resilient financial system but… Basel III and the FSB

At the request of the recent G20 Summits held in the last two years in Washington, London,Pittsburgh and Seoul, different international organizations, such as the IMF, BIS, WB, ECB, WTO, FSB, etc... have engaged to collaborate in the preparation of a new regulatory frame for a sounder global financial system; in particular the BCBS (Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) at BIS (Bank of International Settlements) and the FSB(Financial Stability Board) have reached agreements or will presumably do so in the near future in crucial issues such capital requirements, liquidity, leverage, systemic risk, etc. This paper tries to summarize the new regulatory standards, how they will be phased so that banks can meet the new requirements without impairing the economic recovery and our assessment on its macro and micro implications at the financial systems and real economies.Resilience, Supervision, Regulation, Micro prudential, Capital, Liquidity, Leverage, Macro-prudential, Procyclical, Systemic, Rating, Derivatives

Sigma Model Corrections to the Confining Background

Sigma model ($\alpha^{\prime}$) corrections to the confining string background are obtained. The main result is that the Poincar\'e invariant ansatz is maintained. Physical conditions for the dissapearance of the naked singularity are discussed.Comment: LaTeX,12 page

Reservoir characterization, performance monitoring of waterflooding and development opportunities in Germania Spraberry Unit.

The Germania Unit is located in Midland County, 12 miles east of Midland, Texas and is part of the Spraberry Formation in the Midland Basin which is one of the largest known oil reservoirs in the world bearing between 8.9 billion barrels and 10.5 billion barrels of oil originally in place. The field is considered geologically complex since it comprises typically low porosity, low permeability fine sandstones, and siltstones that are interbedded with shaly non-reservoir rocks. Natural fractures existing over a regional area have long been known to dominate all aspects of performance in the Spraberry Trend Area. Two stages of depletion have taken place over 46 years of production: Primary production under solution gas drive and secondary recovery via water injection through two different injection patterns. The cumulative production and injection in Germania as of July 2003 were 3.24 million barrels and 3.44 million barrels respectively and the production level is 470 BOPD through 64 active wells with an average rate per well of 7.3 BOPD and average water cut of 60 percent. This performance is considered very low and along with the low amount of water injected, waterflood recovery has never been thoroughly understood. In this research, production and injection data were analyzed and integrated to optimize the reservoir management strategies for Germania Spraberry Unit. This study addresses reservoir characterization and monitoring of the waterflood project with the aim of proposing alternatives development, taking into account current and future conditions of the reservoir. Consequently, this project will be performed to provide a significant reservoir characterization in an uncharacterized area of Spraberry and evaluate the performance of the waterflooding to provide facts, information and knowledge to obtain the maximum economic recovery from this reservoir and finally understand waterflood management in Spraberry. Thus, this research describes the reservoir, and comprises the performance of the reservoir under waterflooding, and controlled surveillance to improve field performance. This research should serve as a guide for future work in reservoir simulation and reservoir management and can be used to evaluate various scenarios for additional development as well as to optimize the operating practices in the field. The results indicate that under the current conditions, a total of 1.410 million barrels of oil can be produced in the next 20 years through the 64 active wells and suggest that the unit can be successfully flooded with the current injection rate of 1600 BWPD and pattern consisting of 6 injection wells aligned about 36 degrees respect to the major fracture orientation. This incremental is based in both extrapolations and numerical simulation studies conducted in Spraberry

Analysis of VCO based noise shaping ADCs linearized by PWM modulation

Nonlinearity is one of the main problems associated with VCO based noise shaping ADCs. Their open loop architecture does not permit correction of the nonlinear voltage to frequency response of the VCO by feedback. Recently, linearization of a VCO ADC by Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) precoding has been proposed. Here, the input signal is encoded by a PWM modulator to drive the VCO with a 2-level signal, thus eliminating the nonlinearity of the VCO. This paper analyzes the remaining inherent distortion in such modulators which originates from subsampling the PWM sidebands

In situ experimentation and numerical model validation of thermal flow in shallow crystalline rock, Otaniemi case

Nowadays more attention to environmental-friendly sources of energy has been given, aiming to slow down and counteract the damage to the ecosystem product of the abuse of fossil fuels. Different technologies on energy production, solar, wind, tidal, geothermic, etc., have been researched with the additional challenge of how to store it. From the different types of energy, heat represents a basic need in countries where the climate conditions lead to long and cold periods, namely countries at high latitudes where a big part of the produced energy is destined to household and district heating. The Academy of Finland implemented the New Solar Community Concept project to research the development and application of alternative technologies for production and storage of energy. The use of the local geological domains has been considered as a possible solution for seasonal and long-term energy storage, specifically heat. Aalto University participates in Tackling the challenges of a Solar-Community Concept in High Latitudes by researching the seasonal storage of thermal energy in the ground simulating and assessing thermal flow for different borehole heat exchangers arrays. To do this, numerical models have been implemented, special attention to the Weak Form Equations (WFE) and the Heat Transfer in Pipes (HTiP) models. These models are evaluated using the COSMOL® Multiphysics software, each of them with advantages and disadvantages over the other. An in situ experiment has been performed in Aalto’s research tunnel to validate the results of the numerical models. The aim of the experiment was to assess the performance of the models based on the result comparison between the simulated and the observed data under controlled conditions. The experiment consisted of a single U-pipe borehole heat exchanger operating under seasonal conditions. Two phases were defined, heating and cooling. In the first phase, a constant heat flux is provided to the rock by circulating a heated carrier fluid in the BHE. In the second phase, the circulation is stopped allowing the rock to cool down under normal conditions. The heated field in the rock was tracked with a monitoring borehole one meter away from the heat source. Several digital temperature sensors were installed at the monitoring point in customized equipment referred to this work as Thermal Multisensor Probes for this purpose. The comparison made between model and observed results returned an acceptable accuracy of the predicted values of the models for the heat flow in the rock mass. Additionally, it was identified the WFE model can be improved by calibrating the borehole thermal resistance parameter in the equations, parameter that must come from experimental data. Finally, it was seen that the few discontinuities present across the boreholes had a low impact on the flow of heat through the rock for this experiment. Currently, the tuning of the numerical models is being performed at Aalto University by increasing the weight of different parameters in the models matching the results of the experimentation process