Sustainability Indicators for the Use of Resources—The Exergy Approach

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reached an all-time high in 2010, rising 45% in the past 20 years. The rise of peoples’ concerns regarding environmental problems such as global warming and waste management problem has led to a movement to convert the current mass-production, mass-consumption, and mass-disposal type economic society into a sustainable society. The Rio Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, and other similar environmental milestone activities and happenings, documented the need for better and more detailed knowledge and information about environmental conditions, trends, and impacts. New thinking and research with regard to indicator frameworks, methodologies, and actual indicators are also needed. The value of the overall indicators depends on the production procedure of each material, and indicates their environmental impact. The use of “exergy indicators” based on the exergy content of materials and the use of the second law of thermodynamics in this work presents the relationship between exergy content and environmental impact

Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI: Volume 3

Editors: Federico Castagna, Francesca Mosca, Jack Mumford, Stefan Sarkadi and Andreas Xydis.This volume contains revised versions of the papers selected for the third volume of the Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI (OHAAI). Previously, formal theories of argument and argument interaction have been proposed and studied, and this has led to the more recent study of computational models of argument. Argumentation, as a field within artificial intelligence (AI), is highly relevant for researchers interested in symbolic representations of knowledge and defeasible reasoning. The purpose of this handbook is to provide an open access and curated anthology for the argumentation research community. OHAAI is designed to serve as a research hub to keep track of the latest and upcoming PhD-driven research on the theory and application of argumentation in all areas related to AI

The optimal use of renewable energy sources--The case of the new international "Makedonia" airport of Thessaloniki, Greece

Energy requirements in Greece have been continuously increasing in the past three decades. The share of renewable energy sources use has not kept up with the increase in energy demand. As a result more and more conventional energy sources are used and in this case lignite which is an indigenous source of energy and natural gas, imported from Russia. This energy picture leads towards a greater environmental impact due to the increase of pollutants to the atmosphere. It has been the objective of the European Union to satisfy 22.1% of its electric energy needs by the year 2010 with renewable energy sources. In the year of 1997 only 13.9% were satisfied with renewable energy. For Greece the corresponding figure was 8.6%. Renewable energy sources could cover a major part, if not all, of Thessaloniki's "Makedonia" airport needs, following the promising results of the recent renewable energy sources exploration in the region. The airport "Makedonia" is located a few kilometres south of the city of Thessaloniki on the coastline of Thessaloniki's bay. In this work an optimization model has been developed to determine the optimum share of renewable energy sources in various end-uses such as heating, cooling, and lighting. In this model the reliability and environmental parameters were taken into consideration. The renewable energy sources include solar energy, geothermal energy and biomass.Solar collectors Renewable energy sources Optimization model End-use Photovoltaic Biomass Geothermal energy