274 research outputs found
Beer, wood, and welfare - The impact of improved stove use among dolo-beer breweries
Local beer breweries in Burkina Faso absorb a considerable amount of urban woodfuel demand. We assess the woodfuel savings caused by the adoption of improved brewing stoves by these micro-breweries and estimate the implied welfare effects through the woodfuel market on private households as well as the environmental effect. We find substantial wood savings among the breweries, 36% to 38% if they fully switch to an improved stove. In absolute amounts, they save about 0.176 kg of fuelwood per litre of dolo brewed. These savings imply huge reductions in CO2-emissions and reduce the overall demand for woodfuel, which is predominantly used by the poorer strata for cooking purposes. We provide estimates for the price decrease that might result from this and show that the urban poor are likely to benefit. Thus, the intervention under study is an example for a green growth intervention with pro-poor welfare gains - something green growth strategies should look for. Copyright
Two-way coupling of FENE dumbbells with a turbulent shear flow
We present numerical studies for finitely extensible nonlinear elastic (FENE)
dumbbells which are dispersed in a turbulent plane shear flow at moderate
Reynolds number. The polymer ensemble is described on the mesoscopic level by a
set of stochastic ordinary differential equations with Brownian noise. The
dynamics of the Newtonian solvent is determined by the Navier-Stokes equations.
Momentum transfer of the dumbbells with the solvent is implemented by an
additional volume forcing term in the Navier-Stokes equations, such that both
components of the resulting viscoelastic fluid are connected by a two-way
coupling. The dynamics of the dumbbells is given then by Newton's second law of
motion including small inertia effects. We investigate the dynamics of the flow
for different degrees of dumbbell elasticity and inertia, as given by
Weissenberg and Stokes numbers, respectively. For the parameters accessible in
our study, the magnitude of the feedback of the polymers on the macroscopic
properties of turbulence remains small as quantified by the global energy
budget and the Reynolds stresses. A reduction of the turbulent drag by up to
20% is observed for the larger particle inertia. The angular statistics of the
dumbbells shows an increasing alignment with the mean flow direction for both,
increasing elasticity and inertia. This goes in line with a growing asymmetry
of the probability density function of the transverse derivative of the
streamwise turbulent velocity component. We find that dumbbells get stretched
referentially in regions where vortex stretching or bi-axial strain dominate
the local dynamics and topology of the velocity gradient tensor.Comment: 20 pages, 10 Postscript figures (Figures 5 and 10 in reduced quality
The provision of solar energy to rural households through a fee-for-service system
This baseline report is part of an evaluation commissioned by the Policy
and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Netherlands
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It belongs to a series of impact evaluations
of renewable energy and development programmes supported by the
Netherlands, with a focus on the medium and long term effects of these
programmes on end-users or final beneficiaries. A characteristic of
these studies is the use of mixed methods, being quantitative research
techniques, in combination with qualitative techniques, to get insight in
the magnitude of effects. The purpose of the impact evaluations is to
account for assistance provided and to draw lessons from the findings
for improvement of policy and policy implementation. The results of
these impact evaluations will be input to a policy evaluation of the
“Promoting Renewable Energy Programme” (PREP) to be concluded in
2014
Mobile Robot Localization using Panoramic Vision and Combinations of Feature Region Detectors
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2008, Pasadena, California, May 19-23, 2008), pp. 538-543.This paper presents a vision-based approach for
mobile robot localization. The environmental model is topological. The new approach uses a constellation of different types of affine covariant regions to characterize a place. This type of representation permits a reliable and distinctive environment modeling. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using a database of panoramic images from different rooms. Additionally, we compare different combinations of complementary feature region detectors to find the one that achieves the best results. Our experimental results show promising results for this new localization method. Additionally, similarly to what happens with single detectors, different combinations exhibit different strengths and weaknesses depending on the situation, suggesting that a context-aware method to combine
the different detectors would improve the localization results.This work was partially supported by USC Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE), the FI grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya, the European Social Fund, and the MID-CBR project grant TIN2006-15140-C03-01 and FEDER funds and the grant 2005-SGR-00093
Multi Mode Interferometer for Guided Matter Waves
We describe the fundamental features of an interferometer for guided matter
waves based on Y-beam splitters and show that, in a quasi two-dimensional
regime, such a device exhibits high contrast fringes even in a multi mode
regime and fed from a thermal source.Comment: Final version (accepted to PRL
Semiclassical quantization of the hydrogen atom in crossed electric and magnetic fields
The S-matrix theory formulation of closed-orbit theory recently proposed by
Granger and Greene is extended to atoms in crossed electric and magnetic
fields. We then present a semiclassical quantization of the hydrogen atom in
crossed fields, which succeeds in resolving individual lines in the spectrum,
but is restricted to the strongest lines of each n-manifold. By means of a
detailed semiclassical analysis of the quantum spectrum, we demonstrate that it
is the abundance of bifurcations of closed orbits that precludes the resolution
of finer details. They necessitate the inclusion of uniform semiclassical
approximations into the quantization process. Uniform approximations for the
generic types of closed-orbit bifurcation are derived, and a general method for
including them in a high-resolution semiclassical quantization is devised
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