Digital design protection in Europe : law, trends, and emerging issues

Digital designs – that is, designs for display on electronic screens – have recently burst onto the intellectual property (IP) stage. While in the U.S. a smattering of legal studies have recently addressed the question of digital design as a copyright -, rademark - and patent - eligible subject matter, a European perspective is still lacking in the literature. This study provides an overview of basic legal background to the protection of digital designs in Europe, explores firms’ actual digital design protection behaviors, and highlights some important practical and doctrinal issues that warrant further study

Formalization model of expert knowledge about a technical index level of engineering products

The authors set a timely problem that concerns development of decision making models, which allow formalizing expert subjective ideas about technical index level of engineering products. The authors proposed a formalization model of expert knowledge about technical index level of engineering products on the basis of fuzzy sets. The model has a method of membership-function construction for linguistic variable terms on the basis of exponential functions

Highly Efficient CO₂ Sorbents: Development of Synthetic, Calcium-Rich Dolomites

The reaction of CaO with CO₂ is a promising approach for separating CO₂ from hot flue gases. The main issue associated with the use of naturally occurring CaCO₃, that is, limestone, is the rapid decay of its CO₂ capture capacity over repeated cycles of carbonation and calcination. Interestingly, dolomite, a naturally occurring equimolar mixture of CaCO₃ and MgCO₃, possesses a CO₂ uptake that remains almost constant with cycle number. However, owing to the large quantity of MgCO₃ in dolomite, the total CO₂ uptake is comparatively small. Here, we report the development of a synthetic Ca-rich dolomite using a coprecipitation technique, which shows both a very high and a stable CO₂ uptake over repeated cycles of calcination and carbonation. To obtain such an excellent CO₂ uptake characteristic it was found to be crucial to mix the Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ on a molecular level, that is, within the crystalline lattice. For sorbents which were composed of mixtures of microscopic crystals of CaCO₃ and MgCO₃, a decay behavior similar to natural limestone was observed. After 15 cycles, the CO₂ uptake of the best sorbent was 0.51 g CO₂/g sorbent exceeding the CO₂ uptake of limestone by almost 100%