17 research outputs found

    Corrosion challenges towards a sustainable society

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    A global transition towards more sustainable, affordable and reliable energy systems is being stimulated by the Paris Agreement and the United Nation's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This poses a challenge for the corrosion industry, as building climate-resilient energy systems and infrastructures brings with it a long-term direction, so as a result the long-term behaviour of structural materials (mainly metals and alloys) becomes a major prospect. With this in mind "Corrosion Challenges Towards a Sustainable Society" presents a series of cases showing the importance of corrosion protection of metals and alloys in the development of energy production to further understand the science of corrosion, and bring the need for research and the consequences of corrosion into public and political focus. This includes emphasis on the limitation of greenhouse gas emissions, on the lifetime of infrastructures, implants, cultural heritage artefacts, and a variety of other topics

    Global application of an unoccupied aerial vehicle photogrammetry protocol for predicting aboveground biomass in non‐forest ecosystems

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    This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordData Availability Statement: The data collected for this publication, including aerial images, marker and plot coordinates and dry sample weights, as well as site and survey metadata, are available from the NERC Environmental Information Data Centre . Code for photogrammetric processing and statistical analysis is available at Zenodo Non-forest ecosystems, dominated by shrubs, grasses and herbaceous plants, provide ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and forage for grazing, and are highly sensitive to climatic changes. Yet these ecosystems are poorly represented in remotely sensed biomass products and are undersampled by in situ monitoring. Current global change threats emphasize the need for new tools to capture biomass change in non-forest ecosystems at appropriate scales. Here we developed and deployed a new protocol for photogrammetric height using unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) images to test its capability for delivering standardized measurements of biomass across a globally distributed field experiment. We assessed whether canopy height inferred from UAV photogrammetry allows the prediction of aboveground biomass (AGB) across low-stature plant species by conducting 38 photogrammetric surveys over 741 harvested plots to sample 50 species. We found mean canopy height was strongly predictive of AGB across species, with a median adjusted R2 of 0.87 (ranging from 0.46 to 0.99) and median prediction error from leave-one-out cross-validation of 3.9%. Biomass per-unit-of-height was similar within but different among, plant functional types. We found that photogrammetric reconstructions of canopy height were sensitive to wind speed but not sun elevation during surveys. We demonstrated that our photogrammetric approach produced generalizable measurements across growth forms and environmental settings and yielded accuracies as good as those obtained from in situ approaches. We demonstrate that using a standardized approach for UAV photogrammetry can deliver accurate AGB estimates across a wide range of dynamic and heterogeneous ecosystems. Many academic and land management institutions have the technical capacity to deploy these approaches over extents of 1–10 ha−1. Photogrammetric approaches could provide much-needed information required to calibrate and validate the vegetation models and satellite-derived biomass products that are essential to understand vulnerable and understudied non-forested ecosystems around the globe

    Description of new design of an instrument measuring soil humidity

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    W artykule przedstawiono opis nowej konstrukcji urządzenia do pomiaru wilgotności gleby oraz wyniki jego kalibracji. W zaprojektowanym przez autorów wilgotnościomierzu wykorzystano zjawisko zmian charakterystyk dielektrycznych gleby w wyniku zmian zawartości wody w glebie. Podstawowym elementem urządzenia są trzy elektrody. Zastosowane elektrody tworzą kondensator włączony w obwód oscylatora. Badane próbki gleby o różnej wilgotności wpływają na pojemność elektryczną, a tym samym i częstotliwość oscylatora. Wykorzystany w wilgotnościomierzu procesor zapisuje w pamięci i oblicza różnice pojemności elektrycznej oraz częstotliwości oscylatora i po porównaniu z wzorcem wyświetla uzyskane wartości procentowej wilgotności badanej próbki. Wzorcowa tabela wilgotności gleby stworzona była metodą klasyczną.The article contains description of a new design of an instrument measuring soil humidity and presents its calibration results. Hygrometer designed by the authors uses the effect of changes in dielectric characteristics of soil resulting from changes of water content in soil. Three electrodes constitute basic element of the instrument. Employed electrodes form a condenser included in the oscillator circuit. Examined soil samples characterised by different humidity affect oscillator capacitance and thus its frequency. The processor installed in the hygrometer stores in its memory and computes differences in capacitance and frequency of the oscillator. Then, after having compared them to standard values, it displays obtained results of examined sample percent humidity. Model soil humidity chart has been created using the conventional method

    Synthesis Report on Work Package 2.1 Pressurized: Thermal Shock (PTS)

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    This report summarizes the results of the NURESIM project for the work package 2.1 “Pressurized Thermal Shock (PTS)”. It includes summaries of the single tasks done by the partners involved in this work package. In the Introduction chapter some more general information on the PTS issue is given, which should help to clarify the integration of the single activities. Since the PTS scenario involves different flow situations, for which also different modelling approaches are necessary, the tasks are sorted according to these flow situations. The relation of the work done to the general aim of the NURESIM project, which is to establish a new code platform, is indicated by assigning the activities to 6 different types. The results achieved in the PTS work package are in agreement with the expectations to the NURESIM project. The conclusion drawn from the single investigations and recommendations for future work are discussed in a separate chapter. It was shown, that for further improvement of the CFD-code capabilities for the two-phase PTS case new well-instrumented experimental data are needed especially for condensation at the surface of a sub-cooled liquid jet in a steam environment as well as on free surfaces, turbulence production and bubble entrainment below the jet and mixing in a stratified flow. Integral experiments, which reflect the PTS flow situations, are important to test the interplay between all the sub-models. Some of the local flow situations can be already captured quite well by presently available CFD codes, for other still many open questions exist. In general more flexible models are required which allow switching between different approaches within one flow domain but for the different local flow situations. Examples for such model approaches are the Large Scale Simulation (LSS) which should allow the application of a two-fluid model for dispersed flows and Interface Tracking Methods for large surfaces and the Scale Adaptive Simulations (SAS) which allow the simulation of large eddies while modelling the turbulence at the unresolved scales. The work done leads to a clear improvement of the simulation capabilities regarding a two-phase PTS situation, but caused by the complexity of the issue it will still be a long way to enable predictive simulations for all the different phenomena that occur in this application. In the near term, one may envisage a simplified treatment of two-phase PTS transients by neglecting some effects which are not yet controlled
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