GUIDELINES AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MANAGEMENT AND MONITORING PLANS OF THE POTENTIAL SPECIAL AREA OF CONSERVATION OF BANCO DE LA CONCEPCIÓN

The monitoring plan of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) is a fundamental element within its management plan, being designed for meeting the requirements of the site, as well as controlling and informing about the processes affecting the system analysed. Despite its importance, several deficiencies have been found in the monitoring and management plans of the Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) of the Macaronesian Region within Natura 2000 network. One of these shortfalls deals with the indicators selected. Taking advantage of the need of producing a management plan for upgrading the Banco de La Concepción to a SAC, a methodology able to deal with this issue and to generate the necessary guidelines and recommendations on which the management plan can be based, has been set up. Banco de La Concepción is an offshore seamount located in the Macaronesian biogeographical region, characterized by being a spot of high productivity and biodiversity within a more oligotrophic environment. Among the communities and species existing there we can highlight the presence of reef communities considered a priority habitat and included in the Annex I of the European Habitats Directive as sensitive habitat, as well as the presence of the loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) and the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), both sensitive species included in the Annex II of the same directive. The methods used have been various including: i) the development of a driver-pressure-state-impacts-response (DPSIR) conceptual model, with the aim of determining the elements affecting the MPA for selecting a suitable list of indicators, ii) the Delphi method for incorporating the experts’ opinion, and iii) the implementation of a Multicriteria-Decision-Analysis (MCDA) approach, specifically the Analytical-Hierarchy-Process (AHP) for determining the suitability of the indicators for the evaluated system, thus generating a novel methodological combination used for the first time in a Spain for MPA evaluation. The results obtained highlight the suitability of 18 indicators from 144 initially detected, divided within four groups considered (driving forces, pressures, state/impact and responses). Among them “Fishing effort”, “Catch per unit effort”, “Extent of Habitats/Communities” and “Existence and adoption of a monitoring plan” stand out as the more appropriate for each group regarding the Banco de La Concepción monitoring. Finally, the advices given by the project INDEMARES have been followed and an alternative methodology able to perform in a transparent way the selection of indicators for the Spanish marine SACs management plans, which they currently lack, has been developed

Semi-decentralized Strategies in Structural Vibration Control

In this work, the main ideas involved in the design of overlapping and multi-overlapping controllers via the Inclusion Principle are discussed and illustrated in the context of the Structural Vibration Control of tall buildings under seismic excitation. A detailed theoretical background on the Inclusion Principle and the design of overlapping controllers is provided. Overlapping and multi-overlapping LQR controllers are designed for a simplified five-story building model. Numerical simulations are conducted to asses the performance of the proposed semi-decentralized controllers with positive results

Oxidative degradation of a novel AMP/AEP blend designed for CO2 capture based on partial oxy-combustion technology

Versión aceptada. Embargo 24 mesesSolvent degradation and volatile compound emissions are two of the major concerns about the deployment of carbon capture technologies based on chemical absorption. In this context, partial oxy-combustion might reduce the solvent degradation due to the use of a higher CO2 concentrated flue gas. This work evaluates the oxidative degradation of a novel AMP/AEP blend, namely POS #1, under partial oxy-combustion conditions. The effects of temperature and flue gas composition were evaluated in terms of solvent loss, degradation rates, NH3 emissions and degradation products. The experiments were set at temperatures up to 70 °C and two levels of O2 concentration – 3%v/v and 6%v/v. The CO2 concentration of the flue gas ranged between 15%v/v and 60%v/v CO2. The novel solvent POS#1 showed high resistance to degrade and resulted in lower degradation rates than MEA in all the operating conditions evaluated in this work. The maximum degradation of AEP and AMP was 24% and 19%, respectively. MEA degraded almost double under the same conditions. Temperature and O2 concentration enhanced the oxidative degradation of POS #1. However, the use of higher CO2 concentration in the flue gas led to lower degradation rates of AEP and AMP and hence oxidative degradation was partially inhibited under partial oxy-combustion conditions. The presence of higher CO2 content in the flue gas decreased the NH3 production and a 70% reduction of its emissions was achieved as the CO2 concentration shifted from 15%v/v to 60%v/v. Other major degradation compounds such as formate and 2,4-lutidine were also decreased. New degradation products were not identified so that the suggested degradation pathways proposed in the literature were not influenced by the presence of higher CO2 concentrations.Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad CTM-2014-58573-RUnión Europea, European Development Research Fund (EDRF

LMI-based design of distributed energy-dissipation systems for vibration control of large multi-story structures

In this paper, we present an advanced computational procedure that allows obtaining distributed energy-dissipation systems for large multi-story structures. The proposed methodology is based on a decentralized velocity-feedback energy-to-componentwise-peak (ECWP) controller design approach and can be formulated as a linear matrix inequality (LMI) optimization problem with structure constraints. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design methodology, a passive damping system is computed for the seismic protection of a 20-story building equipped with a complete set of interstory viscous dampers. The high-performance characteristics of the obtained passive ECWP control system are clearly evidenced by the numerical simulation results. Also, the computational effectiveness of the proposed design procedure is confirmed by the low computation time of the associated LMI optimization problem.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Human-computer interaction based on hand gestures using RGB-D sensors

In this paper we present a new method for hand gesture recognition based on an RGB-D sensor. The proposed approach takes advantage of depth information to cope with the most common problems of traditional video-based hand segmentation methods: cluttered backgrounds and occlusions. The algorithm also uses colour and semantic information to accurately identify any number of hands present in the image. Ten different static hand gestures are recognised, including all different combinations of spread fingers. Additionally, movements of an open hand are followed and 6 dynamic gestures are identified. The main advantage of our approach is the freedom of the user’s hands to be at any position of the image without the need of wearing any specific clothing or additional devices. Besides, the whole method can be executed without any initial training or calibration. Experiments carried out with different users and in different environments prove the accuracy and robustness of the method which, additionally, can be run in real-time

Cooperative Periodic Coverage With Collision Avoidance

In this paper, we propose a periodic solution to the problem of persistently covering a finite set of interest points with a group of autonomous mobile agents. These agents visit periodically the points and spend some time carrying out the coverage task, which we call coverage time. Since this periodic persistent coverage problem is NP-hard, we split it into three subproblems to counteract its complexity. In the first place, we plan individual closed paths for the agents to cover all the points. Second, we formulate a quadratically constrained linear program to find the optimal coverage times and actions that satisfy the coverage objective. Finally, we join together the individual plans of the agents in a periodic team plan by obtaining a schedule that guarantees collision avoidance. To this end, we solve a mixed-integer linear program that minimizes the time in which two or more agents move at the same time. Eventually, we apply the proposed solution to an induction hob with mobile inductors for a domestic heating application and show its performance with experiments on a real prototype. IEE

Estructura y morfología de las regiones degradadas del polietileno de ultra alto peso molecular en prótesis articulares

Se realiza el presente estudio en material de 3 prótesis articulares de rodilla para valorar las diferencias morfológicas y estructurales entre las zonas degradadas y no degradadas encontradas en el polietileno de ultra alto peso molecular (PEUAPM). Los implantes estudiados comprenden material degradado tras implante y retirada, material degradado sin implantar y material no degradado sin implantar. Mediante microscopía electrónica de barrido, se analiza la morfología de la zona degradada que explica la pérdida de transparencia del material en la llamada banda blanca. Mediante FTIR, se comprueba la degradación química de la zona de banda y se obtiene el índice de degradación del material, correlacionado con su cristalinidad. Mediante DSC y difractogramas de rayos X, se manifiesta en el material degradado la presencia de fase ortorrómbica pero también monoclínica, cuya cuantificación mediante rayos X abre un nuevo camino para investigar la relación entre degradación del material y fracaso del implante.Peer Reviewe

Medical Image Segmentation to Estimate HER2 Gene Status in Breast Cancer

This work deals with the estimation of HER2 Gene status in breast tumour images treated with in situ hybridization techniques (ISH). We propose a simple algorithm to obtain the amplification factor of HER2 gene. The obtained results are very close to those obtained by specialists in a manual way. The developed algorithm is based on colour image segmentation and has been included in a software application tool for breast tumour analysis. The developed tool focus on the estimation of the seriousness of tumours, facilitating the work of pathologists and contributing to a better diagnosis

Semantically enabling UPnP Networks of Multimedia Home Content

There is plenty of multimedia content available in our homes, stored in multimedia disk drives, personal computers, or digital cameras. Protocols like Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) allow sharing this content among storage devices and displaying them in multimedia renderers in the local area networks of our homes. However, UPnP does not provide native support for the exchange of resources across homes neither does it provide means to describe multimedia content so as to facilitate search across multimedia resources. In this paper we describe a set of extensions to the UPnP protocol to provide a uniform access to multimedia content belonging to different homes, as well as mechanisms to create tag-based and ontology-based metadata, allowing search and Linked-Data publishing of these multimedia resources