PDCA Method for Environmental Management of Pollutants Generated in a Battery Industry in an Amazonian City

The automotive battery industry is a fixed emission source of high pollution potential arising from secondary lead smelting processes pollutants. The management, the quality control standards of air, air pollutant emission limits as well as the allocation and disposal of waste and effluents are provided by legal norms. The objective is to identify management practices and management of atmospheric emissions and the allocation and disposal of waste and effluents in a battery industry that manufactures and reuses materials from reverse logistics to propose a management model based on PDCA- Plan, Do, Check and Act. The specific objectives are:(1)Identify the management and environmental management practices in the industry and relates them with economic development and innovation in industrial processes; (2)Check the procedures adopted for the reverse logistics management and allocation and disposal of wastes, effluents and emissions to mitigate the generation of pollutants; (3)propose management actions and environmental management, according to the PDCA method. It is a descriptive exploratory survey of bibliographical studies and field research with observations of practices in the industry and using the interview questionnaire, to present qualitative and quantitative data. The sample was randomly chosen to focus an industry that generates wastes, effluents and emissions of high polluting potential. Employing the task isintended to answer the question: An environmental management plan based on the PDCA method is able to systematize sustainable actions in an industry that generates highly toxic pollutants? The result is of interest to managers of enterprises that manufacture and reuse of waste battery. This study is important considering thelocus of research, the Amazonian City, which deserves special attention

Obtaining high purity silica from rice hulls

Many routes for extracting silica from rice hulls are based on direct calcining. These methods, though, often produce silica contaminated with inorganic impurities. This work presents the study of a strategy for obtaining silica from rice hulls with a purity level adequate for applications in electronics. The technique is based on two leaching steps, using respectively aqua regia and Piranha solutions, which extract the organic matrix and inorganic impurities. The material was characterized by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), powder x-ray diffraction (XRD), x-ray fluorescence (XRF), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), particle size analysis by laser diffraction (LPSA) and thermal analysis

Water Productivity Modeling by Remote Sensing in the Semiarid Region of Minas Gerais State, Brazil

This chapter aimed to demonstrate the potential of monitoring water and vegetation parameters by combining weather and satellite measurements in mixed agroecosystems in the semiarid region of the northern Minas Gerais state, Southeast Brazil. Soil moisture indices and water productivity components were quantified with Landsat 8 images under different hydrological conditions along the year 2015. The surface resistance to the water fluxes (rs) performed better than the ratio of actual to the reference evapotranspiration (ETr) to detect soil moisture conditions. The mean pixel values for actual evapotranspiration (ET), biomass production (BIO), and water productivity based on evapotranspiration (WP), for irrigated crops (IC), ranged respectively from 2.5 ± 1.3 to 4.1 ± 1.6 mm d−1; 78 ± 62 to 132 ± 64 kg ha−1 d−1; and from 2.2 ± 0.8 to 3.3 ± 0.9 kg m−3. The corresponding ranges for natural vegetation (NV) were 0.1 ± 0.2 to 1.9 ± 1.3 mm d−1; 1 ± 1 to 44 ± 42 kg ha−1 d−1, and 0.6 ± 0.3 to 1.8 ± 0.8 kg m−3. The incremental values, resulting from the replacement of natural species by agricultural crops, were respectively 2.7 mm d−1 and 83 kg ha d−1. However, this replacement increased water productivity based on evapotranspiration (WP) by 264% during the studied year, what should be considered in land use and climate change studies in the Brazilian semiarid region

Interferências da Telefonia Celular em Marcapassos Cardíacos Implantáveis

O avanço tecnológico produz continuamente equipamentos que podem ser fontes potenciais de interferências eletromagnéticas para os marcapassos cardíacos artificiais implantáveis. O principal objetivo deste trabalho é fornecer esclarecimentos aos profissionais que atuam na área de estimulaçao cardíaca artificial sobre o potencial de interferência dos telefones celulares analógicos e digitais sobre os marcapassos cardíacos, para que o paciente portador de marcapasso cardíaco implantável seja orientado de forma adequada quanto à sua utilizaçao

Interferências da Telefonia Celular em Marcapassos Cardíacos Implantáveis

O avanço tecnológico produz continuamente equipamentos que podem ser fontes potenciais de interferências eletromagnéticas para os marcapassos cardíacos artificiais implantáveis. O principal objetivo deste trabalho é fornecer esclarecimentos aos profissionais que atuam na área de estimulaçao cardíaca artificial sobre o potencial de interferência dos telefones celulares analógicos e digitais sobre os marcapassos cardíacos, para que o paciente portador de marcapasso cardíaco implantável seja orientado de forma adequada quanto à sua utilizaçao

The BLue Amazon Brain (BLAB): A Modular Architecture of Services about the Brazilian Maritime Territory

We describe the first steps in the development of an artificial agent focused on the Brazilian maritime territory, a large region within the South Atlantic also known as the Blue Amazon. The "BLue Amazon Brain" (BLAB) integrates a number of services aimed at disseminating information about this region and its importance, functioning as a tool for environmental awareness. The main service provided by BLAB is a conversational facility that deals with complex questions about the Blue Amazon, called BLAB-Chat; its central component is a controller that manages several task-oriented natural language processing modules (e.g., question answering and summarizer systems). These modules have access to an internal data lake as well as to third-party databases. A news reporter (BLAB-Reporter) and a purposely-developed wiki (BLAB-Wiki) are also part of the BLAB service architecture. In this paper, we describe our current version of BLAB's architecture (interface, backend, web services, NLP modules, and resources) and comment on the challenges we have faced so far, such as the lack of training data and the scattered state of domain information. Solving these issues presents a considerable challenge in the development of artificial intelligence for technical domains

Avaliação da relação seca/produtividade agrícola em cenário de mudanças climáticas.

As mudanças climáticas alertam para um possível aumento de eventos meteorológicos extremos em todo o mundo, sendo crescente a preocupação de como o clima pode mudar o ambiente e afetar a produção das culturas agrícolas. Este estudo investiga a relação entre a produtividade agrícola e a seca em algumas mesorregiões do estado de Minas Gerais, em cenários de mudanças climáticas. Foram utilizados dados meteorológicos diários projetados pelo modelo ECHAM5/MPI-OM, para o período de 2008 a 2020 para o cenário A1B. Utilizou-se a metodologia da zona agroecológica (AEZ) para estimar a produtividade futura do milho. Empregou-se o índice de seca Z de Palmer em um modelo de regressão linear com a produtividade do milho estimada pela metodologia da AEZ. O desempenho dos modelos foi verificado por meio das estatísticas: coeficiente de determinação (r2), raiz do erro quadrático médio(RMSE), erro absoluto médio (MAE) e índice de concordância de Willmott (d). Os resultados do índice de concordância de Willmott variaram entre 0,48 e 0,90, e os valores de r2 foram pouco expressivos.Contudo, a produtividade estimada pela metodologia AEZ projetou maiores perdas na produtividade do milho devido a limitações por água para os anos agrícolas de 2008/2009, 2009/2010, 2014/2015,2018/2019 para as mesorregiões Triângulo/Alto Paranaíba, Central Mineira e Jequitinhonha