18,077 research outputs found
Wetland restoration and nitrate reduction: the example of the periurban wetland of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country, North Spain)
Changes in land use and agricultural intensification caused wetlands on the quaternary aquifer of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country) to disappear some years ago and nitrate concentration in groundwaters increased very quickly. The Basque Government recently declared the East Sector of this aquifer a Vulnerable Zone according to the 91/676/CEE European Directive. Recently, the wetlands have been restored through the closure of the main drainage ditches, the consequent elevation of the water table and the abondonment of agricultural practices near the wetlands. This is the case of the Zurbano wetland. Restoration has allowed the recovery of its biogeochemical function, which has reduced nitrate concentrations in waters. Nitrate concentrations which exceed 50 mg lâ1 in groundwaters entering into the wetland are less than 10 mg lâ1 at the outlet. Conditions in the wetland are conducive to the loss of nitrates: organic matter rich wetted soils, clay presence allowing a local semiconfined flow and very low hydraulic gradient. Water quality monitoring at several points around the wetland showed the processes involved in nitrate loss, although some aspects still remain unresolved. However, during storm events, the wetland effectively reduces the nitrate concentration entering the Alegria River, the most important river on the quaternary aquifer
Mixed Integer Linear Programming for Feature Selection in Support Vector Machine
This work focuses on support vector machine (SVM) with feature selection. A
MILP formulation is proposed for the problem. The choice of suitable features
to construct the separating hyperplanes has been modelled in this formulation
by including a budget constraint that sets in advance a limit on the number of
features to be used in the classification process. We propose both an exact and
a heuristic procedure to solve this formulation in an efficient way. Finally,
the validation of the model is done by checking it with some well-known data
sets and comparing it with classical classification methods.Comment: 37 pages, 20 figure
Dalitz plot slope parameters for decays and two particle interference
We study the possible distortion of phase-space in the decays , which may result from final state interference among the decay products.
Such distortion may influence the values of slope parameters extracted from the
Dalitz plot distribution of these decays. We comment on the consequences on the
magnitude of violation of the rule in these decays.Comment: 17 pages, LaTex2e, 6 figures, v2 authors' affiliation modified, to
appear in Mod. Phys. Lett.
The stratified p-center problem
This work presents an extension of the p-center problem. In this new model,
called Stratified p-Center Problem (SpCP), the demand is concentrated in a set
of sites and the population of these sites is divided into different strata
depending on the kind of service that they require. The aim is to locate p
centers to cover the different types of services demanded minimizing the
weighted average of the largest distances associated with each of the different
strata. In addition, it is considered that more than one stratum can be present
at each site. Different formulations, valid inequalities and preprocessings are
developed and compared for this problem. An application of this model is
presented in order to implement a heuristic approach based on the Sample
Average Approximation method (SAA) for solving the probabilistic p-center
problem in an efficient way.Comment: 32 pages, 1 pictur
Bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts based on non-critical raw materials: carbon nanostructures and iron-doped manganese oxide nanowires
Alkaline metal-air batteries are unique systems for energy storage. These devices require a bifunctional catalyst in the positive electrode that must perform both the oxygen evolution and reduction reactions (OER and ORR, respectively). Generally, cobalt-based oxides are employed as air electrodes; however, cobalt is a critical raw material. Future battery devices will mandatorily need non-critical raw materials based on highly abundant metals. Here we investigate the feasibility of iron-doped manganese oxide in the form of nanowires (Fe-MONW) combined with carbon nanofibers. MnO2 is known for being active for the ORR, however its activity towards the OER is not yet fully understood. Carbon nanofibers (CNF) on the other hand, provide the necessary electrical conductivity to the catalytic system. Simple methods and economic materials are employed to synthesize the Fe-MONW/CNF composites. Our results show that there is a synergistic effect between CNF and MONW, especially for the ORR, which manifests in an increase in the number of exchanged electronsâ from 2.9 to 3.5 â and a shift in the onset potential of 70 mV. Doping MONW with iron further enhances the catalytic activity, for both the ORR and OER. Fe ions generate defects in the manganese oxide structure, favoring the adsorption of oxygen and eventually enhancing the catalytic activity. Fe-doped-MONW shows onset potentials for OER comparable to the benchmark catalyst, IrO2. The improvement on the catalytic activity is particularly evident in terms of the reversibility gap, ÎE. ÎE is the difference between the potential when the current density is 10 mA cmâ2 in OER and the half-wave potential for the ORR, being a fundamental parameter to assess the performance of metal-air batteries. The reversibility gap for the best catalyst, 5Fe-MONW/CNF, is ÎE = 922 mV (140 mV lower than non-doped MONW/CNF and between 160 and 320 mV lower than the individual components, MONW and CNF). Endurance tests show remarkable stability of the iron-doped MONW/CNF, with a stable potential and an even lower ÎE of 800 mV for ca. 20 h of operation (charge-discharge cycles at ± 10 mA cmâ2)
Computing coset leaders and leader codewords of binary codes
In this paper we use the Gr\"obner representation of a binary linear code
to give efficient algorithms for computing the whole set of coset
leaders, denoted by and the set of leader codewords,
denoted by . The first algorithm could be adapted to
provide not only the Newton and the covering radius of but also to
determine the coset leader weight distribution. Moreover, providing the set of
leader codewords we have a test-set for decoding by a gradient-like decoding
algorithm. Another contribution of this article is the relation stablished
between zero neighbours and leader codewords
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