Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Composting and Anaerobic Digestion Plants

Almost all biowaste collected in Germany is treated either by composting or by anaerobic digestion (AD). Both treatments result in greenhouse gas emissions. The main focus of the thesis was to quantify the contribution of composting and anaerobic digestion plants to global warming. Data collection and measurements were performed at 9 composting plants and 9 AD plants treating biowaste. In the thesis, GHG emission factors were calculated in g per Mg fresh waste. GHG emissions from composting plants were measured by using a tunnel method, which used a plastic tunnel covering a complete part of a windrow. The tunnel was ventiled by 2 vetilators. The concentration differences of GHG between incoming and outgoing air were used to calculate the emission from the waste under the tunnel. In average, composting resulted in 4060g (Mg biowaste)-1 CH4 emissions, 55g (Mg biowaste)-1 N2O emissions and 157g (Mg biowaste)-1 NH3 emissions, giving a total emission factor of 118kg CO2 equivalents (Mg biowaste)-1. The emission sources at the AD consisted of biofilters, combined heat and power units (CHP), liquid digestate treatment systems (LTS) and open composting windrows of the solid digestate. In average, the biofilters removed 30% of total organic carbon (TOC), 50% of non methane volatile organic carbon (NMVOC) and 51% NH3, whereas N2O concentrations increased by 26%. For CH4 the biofilters had only a small removal effect (6%). Overall, the emission factors were reported as 1.2-16kg (Mg biowaste)-1 for CH4, 9-172g (Mg biowaste)-1 for N2O and 41-6,031g (Mg biowaste)-1 for NH3, giving total emission factors from 50 to 457 kg CO2 equivalents (Mg biowaste)-1. The post-treatment of solid digestate resulted in highest GHG emissions. In order to reduce GHG emissions from composting windrows, small windrows with high turning frequencies and a short composting duration would result in the lowest emissions. For anaerobic digestion plants, potentially there are great GHG emissions benefits if biowaste is treated by wet anaerobic digestion. Wet digestion results in liquid digestate only, which should be directly applied without being composted.Treibhausgas-Emissionen aus Kompostierungsanlagen und Vergärungsanlagen Fast alle gesammelten Bioabfälle werden in Deutschland entweder durch Kompostierung oder durch Vergärung behandelt. Bei der Behandlung entstehen Treibhausgase (THG) wie Methan und Lachgas. Ziel der Arbeit war es, diese Emissionen zu quantifizieren. Messungen erfolgten an 9 Kompostierungsanlagen (KoA) und 9 Vergärungsanlagen (VA). THG-Emissionen von KoA wurden mit Hilfe einer Tunnel-Methode, bei der ein kompletter Teil einer Miete mit einem Kunststoff-Tunnel abgedeckt wurde, gemessen. Der Tunnel wurde mit Hilfe von zwei Ventilatoren belüftet. Die Konzentrationsdifferenzen der Treibhausgase zwischen Zu- und Abluft wurden genutzt, um die Emission der Abfälle unter dem Tunnel zu bestimmen. Im Mittel führte die Kompostierung zu 4.060g (Mg Bioabfälle)-1 CH4 Emissionen, 55g (Mg Bioabfälle)-1 N2O Emissionen und 157g (Mg Bioabfälle)-1 NH3 Emissionen. Daraus ergibt sich ein Emissionsfaktor von 118kg CO2 -Äquivalenten (Mg Bioabfälle)-1. Die Emissionsquellen an VA waren der Biofilter, das Blockheizkraftwerk (BHKW), die flüssigen Gärrest-Behandlungssysteme und die offenen Kompostmieten der festen Gärreste. Im Durchschnitt reduzierten die Biofilter den gesamten organischen Kohlenstoffs (TOC) um 30%, bzw um 50% des Non-Methane Voltile Organic Carbon (NMVOC). CH4 wurde am Biofilter nur sehr wenig abgebaut (6%), dagegen reduzierte sich die NH3-Fracht um 51%. Die N2O Emissionen wurden um 26% erhöht. Insgesamt wurden 1.2-16kg CH4 (Mg Bioabfälle)-1, 9-172g N2O (Mg Bioabfälle)-1 und 41-6.031g NH3 (Mg Bioabfälle)-1 emittiert. Daraus ergibt sich ein Emissionsfaktor von 50 bis 457 kg CO2 -Äquivalenten (Mg Bioabfälle)-1. Die höchsten Emissionen wurden in der Nachbehandlung der festen Gärreste freigesetzt. In der Kompostierung können die Emissionen durch kleine Mieten, öfteres Umsetzen und eine kürzere Behandlungsdauer reduziert werden. Die geringsten Emissionen an THG sind von der Nassvergärung ohne Separierung zu erwarten. Die Nachbehandlung von Gärresten führt zu hohen Treibhausgas-Emissionen. Deshalb sollte Gärrest ohne vorherige Kompostierung direkt angewendet werden

Prenos filozofije in nasprotovanja: vpliv qingovskega konfucianizma na Južni Vietnam

Southern Vietnam was reclaimed by the Vietnamese in the mid-seventeenth century. They first brought their folk Buddhism and various popular religions to new land; however, the bureaucratic system then forced the Chinese Han–Song dynasties’ institutionalized and politicalized Confucianism on the population. The arrival of the Chinese from overseas since the late seventeenth century marked the introduction of Qing Confucianism into Southern Vietnam, shaping the pro-Yangming studies among local literati. Many writers claim that Qing Confucianism had no impact on Vietnam. Obviously, however, these writers ignored the diversity of Vietnamese Confucianism in the new frontiers in the South. Qing Confucianism was truly absorbed into many aspects of life among the local gentry, popularizing the so-called pro-Yangming studies.The article aims to study the transmission, contestation, transformation, and manipulation of Qing Confucianism in Southern Vietnam by penetrating deeper into the life, career, mentality, merits, and influence of local Confucianists and reviving the legacies of practical learning in local scholarship. The research discovers that the practical learning of Qing Confucianism dominated the way of thinking and acting of local elites, affecting ideological, educational, cultural and socio-economic domains of local society. However, the domination of the classical Confucian orthodoxy and the lack of state-sponsored institutionalization in late feudal periods, as well as the later overwhelming imposition of Western civilization under French colonial rule, seriously challenged and downgraded the impacts of Qing Confucianism in Vietnam. Therefore, Yangming studies were once transmitted but had limited impact on Vietnam.Vietnamci so ozemlje Južnega Vietnama pridobili sredi sedemnajstega stoletja. Na novo­pridobljeno ozemlje se je sprva širil ljudski budizem in različne ljudske religije, kasneje pa je birokratski sistem ljudstvu vsilil še institucionaliziran in spolitiziran kitajski konfucianizem, ki se je izoblikoval med dinastijama Han in Song. Kitajski prišleki so v Južni Vietnam od poznega sedemnajstega stoletja naprej prinašali qingovski konfucianizem, pri čemer so se med lokalnimi literati izoblikovale t. i. proyangmingove študije. Številni pisci trdijo, da qingovski konfucianizem ni vplival na razvoj v Vietnamu, a so očitno prezrli raznolikost vietnamskega konfucianizma na novih južnih mejah. Ta je namreč vplival na številne vidike življenja lokalnega plemstva, predvsem pa je populariziral t. i. proyangmingove študije.Namen članka je z raziskovanjem življenja, karier, mentalitete, zaslug in vplivov lokalnih konfucianistov ter s tem oživljanja dediščine praktičnega učenja v lokalni produkciji znanja prikazati prenos, nasprotovanje, transformacijo in manipulacijo qingovskega konfucianizma v Južnem Vietnamu. Študija je pokazala, da je praktično učenje qingovskega konfucianizma določalo način mišljenja in delovanje lokalnih elit ter s tem vplivalo na ideološka, izobraževalna, kulturna in družbeno-ekonomska področja lokalne družbe. Pri tem pa so prevlada klasične konfucijanske ortodoksnosti, pomanjkanje institucionalizacije v poznem fevdalnem obdobju, ki bi jo podpirala država, ter kasnejše uvajanje zahodne civilizacije pod francosko kolonialno vlado postopoma zmanjšali vpliv qingovskega konfucianizma, Yangmingove študije pa so tako v Vietnamu imele zgolj omejen vpliv

Optimal placement of battery energy storage system considering penetration of distributed generations

This paper proposes the optimal problem of location and power of the battery-energy-storage-system (BESS) on the distribution system (DS) considering different penetration levels of distributed generations (DGs). The objective is to minimize electricity cost of the DS in a typical day considering the power limit of DG fed to the DS. Growth optimizer (GO) is first applied to search the BESS’s location and power for each interval of the day. The considered problem and GO method are evaluated on the 18-node DS with two penetrations levels of photovoltaic system and wind turbine. The results demonstrate that the optimal BESS placement significantly reduces electricity cost. Furthermore, the optimal BESS location and power also help to reduce the cut capacity of DGs as their power greater than the load demand. The compared results between GO and particle swarm optimization (PSO) method have shown that GO reaches the better performance than PSO in term the optimal solution and the statistical results. Thus, GO is an effective approach for the BESS placement problem

ViLexNorm: A Lexical Normalization Corpus for Vietnamese Social Media Text

Lexical normalization, a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involves the transformation of words into their canonical forms. This process has been proven to benefit various downstream NLP tasks greatly. In this work, we introduce Vietnamese Lexical Normalization (ViLexNorm), the first-ever corpus developed for the Vietnamese lexical normalization task. The corpus comprises over 10,000 pairs of sentences meticulously annotated by human annotators, sourced from public comments on Vietnam's most popular social media platforms. Various methods were used to evaluate our corpus, and the best-performing system achieved a result of 57.74% using the Error Reduction Rate (ERR) metric (van der Goot, 2019a) with the Leave-As-Is (LAI) baseline. For extrinsic evaluation, employing the model trained on ViLexNorm demonstrates the positive impact of the Vietnamese lexical normalization task on other NLP tasks. Our corpus is publicly available exclusively for research purposes.Comment: Accepted at the EACL 2024 Main Conferenc

Attitude of construction workers toward labour safety

The construction industry has one of the most dangerous working environments among various professions. Workers in construction investment projects account for a large component of the costs, and there are many risks to labour safety. Therefore, ensuring that workers are not injured and aiming for zero labour accidents is a significant imperative and challenge for project managers and construction workers. Ensuring safety during construction work contributes to the success of a project. This paper presents a study of worker attitudes toward labour safety. The research was conducted by using an expert interview approach and questionnaire survey in order to find out which factors influence construction worker attitudes about labour safety conditions. Factor analysis found five factors that affect the attitudes of workers toward labour safety: 1) organisational policy; 2) communication; 3) risk acceptance; 4) psychology; 5) equipment monitoring and management

Leptogenesis in A4A_4 Flavor Symmetry Model by Renormalization Group Evolution

We study how leptogenesis can be implemented in the seesaw models with $A_4$ flavor symmetry, which lead to the tri-bimaximalneutrino mixing matrix. By considering renormalzation groupevolution from a high energy scale of flavor symmetry breaking(the GUT scale is assumed) to the low energy scale of relevantphenomena, the off-diagonal terms in a combination of DiracYukawa-coupling matrix can be generated. As aresult, the flavored leptogenesis is successfully realized. Wealso investigate how the effective light neutrino mass $|\langle m_{ee}\rangle |$ associated with neutrinoless double beta decaycan be predicted byimposing the experimental data on the low energy observables. Wefind a link between the leptogenesis and the neutrinoless doublebeta decay characterized by $|\langle m_{ee}\rangle|$ through ahigh energy CP phase $\phi$, which is correlated with the lowenergy Majorana CP phases. It is shown that the predictions of $|\langle m_{ee}\rangle|$ for some fixed parameters of the highenergy physics can be constrained by the current observation ofbaryon asymmetry

Two Higgs singlets A4A_4 Flavor Symmetry with Minimal Breaking

We study the seesaw realization of a $A_4$model with two Higgs singlets. In this model, the mixing angle $\theta_{13}$ and leptogenesis are zero if the components of right handed neutrino mass matrix resulting from the two Higgs singlets are exact degenerate. We then study the minimal breaking of the model by a tiny shift between aforementioned components. This minimal breaking results in deviations of lepton mixing angles from their tri-bimaximal mixing values in which the current experimental value of $\theta_{13}$ can be achieved. Besides, the baryon asymmetry of the Universe is successfully generated through non-zero leptogenesis by the decay of right handed neutrinos