The environmental impact evaluation of a wind farm in Vietnam

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.This research conducts an in-depth analysis of the environmental impact assessment of a wind farm in Vietnam, with a view to identifying the various environmental stressors and then assess them under suitable impact categories. Although wind power releases no emissions during operation, there is an environmental impact related to the wind turbine during the entire life cycle from manufacturing to dismantling. In this study, a Life Cycle Assessment is carried out to quantify the environmental impact of twenty existing 1.5 MW wind turbines. The assessment analyses emissions in different unit processes and compares the means of different emissions during the lifetime of a wind farm. Furthermore, at the end of the thesis, the energy payback time is determined based on the cumulative energy requirements for a 20-year life period. For the quantitative analysis of the material and energy balances over the life cycle, all unit processes based on life cycle assessment are determined, and many matrix series are designed and calculated. Moreover, the environmental impact categories are set to match the conditions in Vietnam and the aims of the research. This study also shows that while the comprehensive life cycle inventory of a wind farm is heavily dependent on the unit processes, the impact can be divided into three categories: raw material data input, energy consumed in each unit process, and the emission outputs such as CO2, SO2, CH4, etc.. The three impact categories allow the classification of the emissions and give results for all life cycle assessment. Finally the findings shows that the largest emission contribution is mainly derived from the manufacturing phase, which varies from 60 % to 80 % of the total life cycle stages. The totalCO2 equivalent emissions in the climate change category is around 14 g for every kWh of electricity generated from the wind plant and the primary energy return is 5 months. This research is a good example that proves that a wind plant is one of the best options for mitigating climate change and for providing electricity in rural areas that are not connected to the grid. It can be stated that wind energy is among one of the cleanest sources of energy available today

A new algorithm for time-frequency spread coders using multirate filters

Filter banks have been shown to be efficient in several emerging signal communication applications. A new class of time-frequency spread coders for transmultiplexer systems using multirate filter banks is presented. As compared with conventional filter banks designed with stopband attenuation and passband flatness criteria, the user coders with the new algorithms are designed with time and frequency spread criteria. In new the algorithms, the filters are achieved through a cascade of lattice structures and delay chains. Along with the time-frequency property and the reconstruction property, the intercode/intracode correlation property are included in the design algorithms to be optimized. The designed coders are used in the application of digital watermarking of images and demonstrate good performance in JPEG encoding at different qualities.published_or_final_versio

Energy-Efficient Signalling in QoS Constrained Heterogeneous Networks

© 2013 IEEE. This paper considers a heterogeneous network, which consists of one macro base station and numerous small cell base stations (SBSs) cooperatively serving multiple user terminals. The first objective is to design cooperative transmit beamformers at the base stations to maximize the network energy efficiency (EE) in terms of bits per joule subject to the users' quality of service (QoS) constraints, which poses a computationally difficult optimization problem. The commonly used Dinkelbach-type algorithms for optimizing a ratio of concave and convex functions are not applicable. This paper develops a path-following algorithm to address the computational solution to this problem, which invokes only a simple convex quadratic program of moderate dimension at each iteration and quickly converges at least to a locally optimal solution. Furthermore, the problem of joint beamformer design and SBS service assignment in the three-objective (EE, QoS, and service loading) optimization is also addressed. Numerical results demonstrate the performance advantage of the proposed solutions

Relationship between body mass index and percent body fat in Vietnamese: Implications for the diagnosis of obesity

© 2015 Ho-Pham et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Background The burden of obesity in Vietnam has not been well defined because there is a lack of reference data for percent body fat (PBF) in Asians. This study sought to define the relationship between PBF and body mass index (BMI) in the Vietnamese population. Methods The study was designed as a comparative cross-sectional investigation that involved 1217 individuals of Vietnamese background (862 women) aged 20 years and older (average age 7 yr) who were randomly selected from the general population in Ho Chi Minh City. Lean mass (LM) and fat mass (FM) were measured by DXA (Hologic QDR 4500). PBF was derived as FM over body weight. Results Based on BMI 30, the prevalence of obesity was 1.1% and 1.3% for men and women, respectively. The prevalence of overweight and obesity combined (BMI 25) was ∼ 24% and ∼ 19% in men and women, respectively. Based on the quadratic relationship between BMI and PBF, the approximate PBF corresponding to the BMI threshold of 30 (obese) was 30.5 in men and 41 in women. Using the criteria of PBF >30 in men and PBF >40 in women, approximately 15% of men and women were considered obese. Conclusion These data suggest that body mass index underestimates the prevalence of obesity. We suggest that a PBF >30 in men or PBF >40 in women is used as criteria for the diagnosis of obesity in Vietnamese adults. Using these criteria, 15% of Vietnamese adults in Ho Chi Minh City was considered obese

A new synthesis procedure for linear-phase paraunitary digital filter banks

In this paper, a new design algorithm is presented for a family of linear phase paraunitary filter banks with generalized filter length and symmetric polarity. A number of new constraints on the distributions of filter length and symmetry polarity among the channels are derived. In the algorithm, the lengths of the filters are gradually reduced through a cascade of lattice structures. The derivations for filter banks with even and odd number of channels are formulated in a unified form.published_or_final_versio

2-D two-fold symmetric circular shaped filter design with homomorphic processing application

A design method of a linear-phased, two-dimensional (2-D), two-fold symmetric circular shaped filter is presented in this paper. Although the proposed method designs a non-separable filter, its implementation has linear complexity. The shape of the passband and the stopband is expressed in terms of level sets of second order trigonometric polynomials. This enables the transformation of the filter specifications to a Semi-Definite Program (SDP) of moderate dimension. The proposed filter outperforms currently available filter design methods. We present a performance comparison, as well as a homomorphic processing image enhancement example to illustrate the effectiveness of this method. ©2010 IEEE

Development and validation of a prognostic model for predicting 30-day mortality risk in medical patients in emergency department (ED)

© 2017 The Author(s). The primary aim of this prospective study is to develop and validate a new prognostic model for predicting the risk of mortality in Emergency Department (ED) patients. The study involved 1765 patients in the development cohort and 1728 in the validation cohort. The main outcome was mortality up to 30 days after admission. Potential risk factors included clinical characteristics, vital signs, and routine haematological and biochemistry tests. The Bayesian Model Averaging method within the Cox's regression model was used to identify independent risk factors for mortality. In the development cohort, the incidence of 30-day mortality was 9.8%, and the following factors were associated with a greater risk of mortality: male gender, increased respiratory rate and serum urea, decreased peripheral oxygen saturation and serum albumin, lower Glasgow Coma Score, and admission to intensive care unit. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the model with the listed factors was 0.871 (95% CI, 0.844-0.898) in the development cohort and 0.783 (95% CI, 0.743-0.823) in the validation cohort. Calibration analysis found a close agreement between predicted and observed mortality risk. We conclude that the risk of mortality among ED patients could be accurately predicted by using common clinical signs and biochemical tests

Applicability of zirconium loaded okara in the removal and recovery of phosphorus from municipal wastewater

© 2019 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. Recently, there is a new trend to consider wastewater as a precious resource. Since phosphorus is a limited non-renewable element, and MAP (Magnesium Ammonium Phosphate - MgNH4PO4.6H2O) is a valuable slow-release fertilizer, the recovery of phosphorous as MAP has received special attention from scientists all over the world. However, the application of this process with municipal wastewater is still a challenge, due to low concentration of phosphorus and high volume of municipal wastewater. This study investigates the potential of reclaiming MAP from municipal wastewater by combination of adsorption and crystallization. Soybean milk residue (okara) was loaded with Zirconium (Zr) to prepare the adsorbent (ZLO). Adsorption and desorption experiments were conducted in a semi-pilot scale ZLO packed colum system. Effects of P: N: Mg molar ratios, chemical sources and temperature on the formation of MAP were examined in an attempt to identify the optimal crystallization conditions. The attained precipitate was characterized using XRD, SEM, FTIR techniques. It was found that the ZLO packed column adsorption-desorption system could pre-concentrate phosphorus from municipal wastewater up to 28.36 times, fitting well the minimum requirement (50 mg P/L) for the economical MAP recovery. Up to 95.19% of dissolved phosphorus in desorption solution was recovered at pH = 9, Mg: N: P molar ratio = 2:2:1, using a combination of MgCl2.6H2O and NH4Cl. The harvested MAP exhibited high purity (92.59%), high P-availability (89% by mass), and extremely low levels of heavy metals. The results prove that it is viable to recover MAP from municipal wastewater by employing ZLO as adsorbent, followed by crystallization. This paves the way for mining phosphorus from municipal wastewater and reducing okara as an agricultural byproduct in a green way