Atmospheric corrosion in the Canary Islands

Corrosion is a process that occurs naturally and irreversibly. It is defined as the deterioration of a material (usually a metal) due to its interaction with the surrounding environment. Economic losses related to corrosive processes account for about 5% of the Gross National Product (GNP) of Western countries, China and India. Only in the United States, the costs related to metal corrosion are estimated at app. $1,000 annual per capita, and responsible for a substantial portion of this cost is atmospheric corrosion. Within the various types of corrosive processes, atmospheric corrosion attracts great interest since it affects the entirety of metal materials exposed to air, including urban and industrial infrastructures. It is a widelystudied process, and there are national and international standardized norms for its characterization classifying the aggressiveness of a given environment for a specific metal type (usually those most widely used by the industry). However, major discrepancies between the results of direct exposure and those obtained from the application of standardized norms and predictive models occur for fragmented geographical areas, as in the case of archipelagos. In the Canary Islands, due to their characteristic orography and the regime of winds that affects the archipelago, a multitude of microclimates is generated in a very small geographical area. This variability of atmospheric environments in different islands means, even for the same metal, that the extent of the atmospheric attack may vary substantially between two locations separated only a few miles away. This fact imposes the need for the development of specific prediction models to characterize the corrosion rate for different metals. Investigations carried out in the Canary Islands allowed the characterization of the atmospheric corrosion for metals of wide industrial use (namely mild steel, galvanized steel, zinc, copper, and aluminium), and to obtain maps of atmospheric corrosivity for all the islands. Specific mathematical models have been developed for the prediction of the corrosion rates for these metals exposed on the various islands that make up the archipelag

Fluoride removal from natural volcanic underground water by an electrocoagulation process: Parametric and cost evaluations

The water supply on the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) comes mainly from aquifers of volcanic origin that are notable for the high content of fluorides that make it unviable for human consumption without prior conditioning treatment. The treatments that generate a high rejection of water are not viable, since water is a scarce natural resource of high value. An electrocoagulation process was investigated as a method to treat natural groundwater from volcanic soils containing a dangerously high fluoride content. The operating parameters of an electrocoagulation reactor model with parallel plate aluminum electrodes were optimized for batch and continuous flow operations. In the case of batch operation, it was found that acidification of the water improved fluoride elimination efficiency, with a maximum at pH 3. Yet, operation at the natural pH of the water achieved elimination efficiencies between 82 and 92% depending on the applied current density. An optimum current density of 5 mA/cm2 was found in terms of the highest removal efficiency, and the kinetics of fluoride removal was adjusted to a pseudo-second-order kinetics. In the continuous-flow operation, with an optimal residence time of 10 min and a separation of 0.5 cm between the electrodes, it was observed that the current density that would be applied would depend on the initial concentration of fluoride in the raw water. Then, an initial fluoride concentration of 6.02 mg/L required a current density > 7.5 mA/cm2 to comply with the legal guidelines in the product water, while for an initial concentration of 8.98 mg/L, the optimum current density was 10 mA/cm2. Under these operating conditions, the operating costs will vary between 0.20 and 0.26 €/m3 of treated wate

Continuous web personalization using selector-template pairs

Due to the fast growth of the Web and to the interactivity brought by Web 2.0, government, entertainment, and education services are more and more available through the Internet. However, this highly interactive Web still excludes people by not considering capabilities of all users. Although there are techniques and approaches towards Web Accessibility, issues related to different user needs may emerge in unforeseen contexts of use. This paper proposes a personalization approach that considers detailed observational data from usage and generates user interface adjustments (pieces of JavaScript code) from a set of selector-template pairs. Selectors are regular expressions used to identify patterns in event streams and templates are adjustments skeletons, referring user interface elements identified by the selectors. The approach supports continuous personalization of websites aiming to reduce the number of accessibility barriers and usability problems. This work is part of a long-term project and it reports the study conducted "in the wild" with 408 users, during a period of 30 months. The results point that the approach is a scalable solution towards Web personalization by inserting JavaScript pieces of code to tailor websites according to how they are used, on the fly19W4A '19: Web For All 2019 Personalization - Personalizing the Web2019-05CaliforniaSan Francisc

A Prospect Of Websites Evaluation Tools Based On Event Logs

The variety of websites evaluation tools based on event logs is growing, but some of their limitations are already visible (e.g., the need for task model, plug-in dependency, use of simulated tasks, separation of accessibility from usability, etc). Some of these characteristics result in coupled systems and make the configuration and use of these tools more expensive. This work aims to show the main features and weaknesses of these tools. One expects that the discussion and the requirements pointed out in this paper could help developers of evaluation tools so they could reuse consolidated ideas and avoid identified weaknesses. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.27299104Claypool, M., Le, P., Wased, M., Brown, D., Implicit interest indicators (2001) IUI '01: Proceedings of the 6th Int. conference on intelligent user interfaces, pp. 33-40. , New York, NY, USA, ACMCorreani, F., Leporini, B., Paternò, F., Automatic inspection-based support for obtaining usable web sites for vision-impaired users (2006) Universal Access in the Information Society, 5 (1)Etgen, M., Cantor, J., What does getting wet (web event-logging tool) mean for web usability? (1999) Proceedings of 5th Conference on Human Factors & the WebGuzdial, M., Deriving software usage patterns from log files (1993), Technical report, Georgia Institute of TechnologyHilbert, D.M., Redmiles, D.F., Extracting usability information from user interface events (2000) ACM Comput. Surv, 32 (4), pp. 384-421Hong, I.J., Heer, J., Waterson, S., Landay, A.J., Webquilt: A proxy-based approach to remote web usability testing (2001) ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 19 (3), pp. 263-285Ivory, M.Y., Hearst, M.A., The state of the art in automating usability evaluation of user interfaces (2001) ACM Comput. Surv, 33 (4), pp. 470-516Paganelli, L., Paternò, F., Intelligent analysis of user interactions with web applications (2002) IUI '02: Proceedings of the 7th int. conf. on intelligent user interfaces, pp. 111-118. , ACMRubin, J., (1994) Handbook Of Usability Testing: How to plan, design, and conduct effective tests, , 1st edn. John Wiley & Sons IncStamper, R.: A semiotic theory of information and information systems/ applied semiotics. In: Invited papers for the ICL/University of Newcastle Seminar on Information, (1993)Woo, D., Mori, J.: Accessibility: A tool for usability evaluation. In Masoodian, M., Jones, S., Rogers, B., eds.: APCHI. 3101 of LNCS, Springer (2004) 531-53