Low-Cost Waste Management Solutions for Small-to-Medium Scale Pig Farms in China

Within the last several years, the Chinese government has implemented strict new waste management regulations for Chinese pig farms. Our project team has partnered with a rural pig farmer, Mr. Zhu, in Anhui Province, China. Our team will research and recommend environmentally and financially sustainable waste management solutions that will help Mr. Zhu’s farm remain compliant. During a summer 2018 assessment trip, we found inadequate storage capacity for pig slurry and issues of wastewater runoff. We also conducted a local community survey and found that local residents are concerned with odor and wastewater runoff from the farm. We will design a treatment system for Mr. Zhu to address these issues by the end of 2018. The library mini-grant will help fund a follow-up trip in summer 2019, during which we will assess and evaluate the solutions that Mr. Zhu will have implemented. We will also conduct a follow-up community survey to confirm that broader community concerns have been addressed.DOW Sustainability granthttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148849/1/Liu.pd

Improving Building Sustainability: Lighting Life Cycle Optimization and Management, and HVAC Demand Response

Residential and commercial buildings represent 39% of global energy carbon emissions. In the U.S., buildings consume 40% of the total energy consumption and thus represent a substantial energy saving opportunity. Additionally, building energy flexibility, or the ability to reduce or move demand to a different time, is playing an increasingly important role in grid modernization and renewable integration by helping to balance supply. Material efficiency is another foundation to sustainability, as many energy-efficient and renewable technologies depend on the use of specialty materials, which are dwindling in supply and many face geopolitical conflicts. This dissertation advances methods of life cycle analysis and data analytics while addressing some of these issues and opportunities in three key aspects – how to choose better products, how to better manage products at their end of life, and how to use energy more effectively. Chapter 2 and 3 examine the keep vs. replace conundrum by studying the replacement of residential and commercial lighting, in which the rapidly changing LED technology creates unclear tradeoffs with incumbent lighting in terms of cost, energy savings, and emissions. The results suggest that while LED lighting offers competitive performance and life cycle cost as fluorescent lighting, there is less advantage (or benefit) for immediate LED adoption in a lower use, upfront cost-sensitive, or slowly decarbonizing grid situation. Chapter 4 evaluates the life cycle impacts of recovering rare earth and critical metals from spent linear fluorescent and LED fixtures, respectively. This chapter also assesses the impacts of extended use and modular (component) replacement to assess the value of reverse logistics (reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling). The results show that both types of metal extraction create net environmental impacts, which can be mitigated with process optimization and waste preprocessing to increase extraction efficiency. While modular replacement leads to overall lower environmental burdens, full replacement can offer incentive for LED recycling as their metal-heavy housing structure and heat sink are attractive to recyclers. Chapter 5 performs piecewise log-linear-Fourier regressions on whole-home smart meter data and outdoor temperature data to disaggregate the thermostatically controlled loads from whole-home consumption and to estimate the technical thermal demand response potentials in the Midwest. The results suggest that single family buildings, being the higher energy users and larger customer base than multi-family, can provide higher per customer and aggregated demand flexibility. However, multi-family buildings, particularly those with a central HVAC system, may have the advantage of pooled demand across multiple units and should therefore be considered accordingly. By examining the three decision-making questions related to technology and product selection (Chapter 2 - 3), waste management and material recovery (Chapter 4), and energy use and demand response (Chapter 5), the research helps inform decision making for building managers and energy consumers, and provide industry with insights regarding product design, reverse logistics, and demand response program recruitment.PHDMech Eng & Nat Res Env PhDUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163086/1/lixiliu_1.pd

Adaptive High Voltage Pulse Signal Generator Circuit Design

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is widely used in area of geologic exploration, hidden stationary subject detection and quality inspection on various infrastructures. The pulse generator, which offers very accurate timing information, is the most cardinal component in GPR systems. It is easy to design a pulse generator which produces pulse with pre-settled peak value and pulse width in nanosecond scale. However, since the system is working in complicated environments, various pulses in different pulse widths and amplitudes are needed. In this background, pulse generators in tunability and stability are precious in value and universal in use. Indeed, a few adaptive high voltage pulse signal generators in UWB circuit level have been developed. A pulse generator with tunable pulse width and controllable voltage amplitude is proposed under these demands. The proposed circuit implementation combines System-On-Chip (SOC) design with Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design because we intend to realize modulation separately. We also design an easy input console named Binary Input Array in the research to realize control simplicity. Furthermore, we employ mathematical model to optimize parameters in each component in order to have an improved performance. Simulation data are obtained from Cadence Virtuoso and OrCAD Capture

La politica comunitaria preferenziale di cooperazione allo sviluppo : un'analisi giuridica nel contesto comunitario e internazionale

Defence date: 5 September 1997Supervisor: Francis SnyderFirst made available online 06 July 2017Obiettivo della tesi è analizzare il significato e l'evoluzione della Politica Comunitaria Preferenziale di Cooperazione allo Sviluppo. Tale lavoro di ricerca non intende essere un 'percorso storico', uno studio cronologico dell'evoluzione delle relazioni preferenziali con gli ACP, dal Trattato di Roma al Trattato di Maastricht. Piuttosto esso si prefigge di analizzare la Politica di Cooperazione allo Sviluppo preferenziale attraverso la sua trasformazione, avvenuta nella pratica comunitaria, da una situazione 'de facto', a una situazione 'de jure'. Ovvero il passaggio da 'relazioni di cooperazione', avviate fin dalle origini del sistema comunitario (Trattato di Roma), ad una reale Politica Comunitaria di Cooperazione con il riconoscimento specifico di una competenza in tale settore in capo alla Comunità (Trattato di Maastricht)

Framing and shaping migration governance: the case of EU-Tunisian migration relations

Migration governance is an organisational process, which means it centres on how organisations make sense of and respond to signals from their environment. This thesis contributes to the study of migration governance by developing comparative insight into how organisationally bound and ‘situated’ migration governance processes in Tunisia and at European Union (EU) level relate to each other and, through their actions and inactions, define the challenges that they face. An abundance of literature is available on the ‘EU’s external migration governance’. However, much of this literature focuses on the policy outputs produced, or the policy outcomes determined, often reaching assumptions on processes of migration governance based on these analyses. As the EU has been the main driver of this policy production, the literature developed is largely Eurocentric, and often fails to give adequate and equal consideration to non-EU state dynamics. To address these issues, the thesis develops an actor-centred analysis of the organisational processes through which migration is conceptualised in the EU and in Tunisia, building from theories that value the importance of framing and sensemaking. Based on forty three interviews with migration governance actors across the two cases and extensive use of the primary and secondary literature, it analyses the dual meaning of migration governance, as actors first need to make sense of migration diagnosing its causes and consequences; and then prognosing a line of work that follows such diagnoses. The thesis finds that migration governance systems play a key role in defining migration and its challenges, rather than being simply externally impacted by them. By understanding the importance of cognitive biases and dissonance in shaping individual understandings and thus actions, it shows that contrary to what much of the available literature assumes, the EU is failing to externalise its priorities and associated meanings of migration, and EU-Tunisian migration relations remain a field of profound contestation. Firstly, the EU is not as strong as expected in this ‘profusion’ of its ideas because the thesis shows that these are contested in the EU itself. This notwithstanding, the thesis shows that the EU is driven by a framing of migration related to crisis, which urges action. Tunisia actively resists the profusion of migration frames and policies of migration from the EU preferring inaction, which aligns with a rights-based approach that emerged after the 2011 revolution and which included the right to mobility, and a view of Tunisian migration as an opportunity for the country. As such, a clash characterizes these relations, between the products of EU framings of migration, such as return and readmission, and Tunisian ones, such as increasing mobility for its citizens

Fuzzy Modeling and Control Based Virtual Machine Resource Management

Virtual machines (VMs) are powerful platforms for building agile datacenters and emerging cloud systems. However, resource management for a VM-based system is still a challenging task. First, the complexity of application workloads as well as the interference among competing workloads makes it difficult to understand their VMs’ resource demands for meeting their Quality of Service (QoS) targets; Second, the dynamics in the applications and system makes it also difficult to maintain the desired QoS target while the environment changes; Third, the transparency of virtualization presents a hurdle for guest-layer application and host-layer VM scheduler to cooperate and improve application QoS and system efficiency. This dissertation proposes to address the above challenges through fuzzy modeling and control theory based VM resource management. First, a fuzzy-logic-based nonlinear modeling approach is proposed to accurately capture a VM’s complex demands of multiple types of resources automatically online based on the observed workload and resource usages. Second, to enable fast adaption for resource management, the fuzzy modeling approach is integrated with a predictive-control-based controller to form a new Fuzzy Modeling Predictive Control (FMPC) approach which can quickly track the applications’ QoS targets and optimize the resource allocations under dynamic changes in the system. Finally, to address the limitations of black-box-based resource management solutions, a cross-layer optimization approach is proposed to enable cooperation between a VM’s host and guest layers and further improve the application QoS and resource usage efficiency. The above proposed approaches are prototyped and evaluated on a Xen-based virtualized system and evaluated with representative benchmarks including TPC-H, RUBiS, and TerraFly. The results demonstrate that the fuzzy-modeling-based approach improves the accuracy in resource prediction by up to 31.4% compared to conventional regression approaches. The FMPC approach substantially outperforms the traditional linear-model-based predictive control approach in meeting application QoS targets for an oversubscribed system. It is able to manage dynamic VM resource allocations and migrations for over 100 concurrent VMs across multiple hosts with good efficiency. Finally, the cross-layer optimization approach further improves the performance of a virtualized application by up to 40% when the resources are contended by dynamic workloads

Celluloid ceiling

Die vorliegende Diplomarbeit widmet sich der Lage österreichischer Filmemacherinnen, wobei im Speziellen der Frauenanteil in der Filmförderung analysiert wird. Dabei werden die Rohdaten zum Frauenanteil von vier Förderstellen ausgewertet und miteinander verglichen. Um sowohl die zwei größten Förderinstitutionen, als auch kleinere Förderungen zu berücksichtigen und etwaige Unterschiede je nach höhe der Budgets zu erfassen, erstreckt sich die Analyse auf die Daten des Österreichischen Filminstituts, Filmfonds Wien, Innovative Filmförderung des Bundesministeriums für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur, sowie die Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien, MA 7. Ausgewertet wurde neben dem Frauenanteil bei den Förderzusagen, auch die Förderungshäufigkeit von Frauen, welche den Frauenanteil bei den Förderanträgen mit jenem der Förderzusagen vergleicht. Um noch einen Einblick in die Erfahrungswelt von weiblichen Filmschaffenden zu erfassen und auch vertiefende Fragestellungen zu beantworten wurden zusätzlich vier qualitative Leitfadeninterviews mit Expertinnen aus der Filmbranche geführt. Grundsätzlich konnten im Rahmen der Diplomarbeit - mit Ausnahme des Filmfonds Wien - keine „Benachteiligung“ bei der Filmförderung festgestellt werden. Dies deckt sich auch mit den Beobachtungen der Expertinnen, welche die Problematik im Vorfeld verorteten. Nicht nur die männlich dominierte Landschaft an Filmproduktionen, auch die Ausbildungssituation und der Schritt in die Branche scheinen Schlüsselrollen einzunehmen. Nichtsdestotrotz ist der Frauenanteil an den geförderten Filmen besonders bei den großen Filmförderinstitutionen relativ gering, während er bei den kleinen Fördertöpfen weitaus höher ist. Der Einschätzung der Expertinnen nach, sei diese Situation ohne Quote in der Filmförderung kaum zu verbessern. Aufgrund der Komplexität ist jedoch davon auszugehen, dass eine Reihe von Maßnahmen nötig ist, um eine nachhaltige Verbesserung herbeizuführen

Forget metamaterial: It does not improve sound absorption performance as it claims

The term `sub-wavelength' is commonly used to describe innovative sound-absorbing structures usually labeled as `metamaterials'. Such structures, however, inherently do not bring groundbreaking advancements. This study addresses the limitations imposed by the thickness criterion of Yang et al. by introducing the concept of equivalent mass-spring-damping parameters within the resonator framework. This innovative approach introduces an index of `half-absorption bandwidth' to effectively overcome the thickness restriction. Four practical cases are then presented to correct prevalent misleading conceptions about low-frequency, broadband absorption as claimed. The phenomenon of mass disappearing in the expression of sound absorption coefficient supports the conclusion that volume is the only determinant factor in sound absorption performance. Any attempts to improve sound absorption solely through geometry and structural designs would inevitably sacrifice the half-absorption bandwidth. Additionally, the concept of negative stiffness or bulk modulus is merely a mathematical convention without any real improvement in absorption performance. Overall, this research focuses on the physical mechanism of sound-absorbing structures by correcting traditional misunderstandings, and offers a comprehensive framework for assessing and enhancing sound absorption.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, part of the first author's Ph.D. thesi

An EU-Africa partnership scheme for human capital formation and skill mobility. CEPS Project Report. June 2019

Proper management of migration across the Mediterranean Sea requires close cooperation between the EU and African countries. Cooperation is difficult because core interests diverge. EU countries are focused on curbing irregular migration; African countries are primarily interested in economic development, with migration as one of the opportunities. At the moment, the EU lacks a credible long-term programme to engage African countries on migration issues. We propose an ambitious EU-Africa partnership scheme for human capital formation and skill mobility that can be embedded into the current framework for EU-Africa dialogue. The scheme comprises three elements: First, extensive vocational training programmes would be set up in African countries, funded by the EU or individual member states, to train participants according to labour market needs in both the EU and African countries. Second, EU member states would issue a substantial number of work permits, offering programme graduates a good chance of employment in the EU while allowing member states to manage the inflow of workers according to their needs. Third, the private sector would be actively involved in planning and implementing vocational training programmes to ensure that graduates are employable in the EU and to facilitate job search and hiring across the Mediterranean. The scheme fits in the current legal framework for labour migration into the EU, and should be seen as one element in building a comprehensive forward-looking partnership with Africa for the benefit of all stakeholders involved in both origin and destination countries