Socio-economic assessement of farmers' vulnerability as water users subject to global change stressors in the hard rock area of southern India. The SHIVA ANR project

International audienceDemand for vulnerability assessments is growing in policy-making circles, to support the choice of appropriate measures and policies to reduce the vulnerability of water users and resources. Through the SHIVA ANR project, we are seeking a method to assess and map the vulnerability of farmers in southern India to both climate and socioeconomic changes, and secondly, to assess the costs and benefits associated with trends farmers' vulnerability in the medium and long-term. The project is focusing on southern India 's hard rock area, as in the geological context, both surface and ground water resources are naturally limited. We are also focusing on farming populations as these are the main water users in the area and rely exclusively on groundwater. The area covers southern India's semi-arid zone, where the rainfall gradient ranges from 600 mm to 1100 mm. Vulnerability is expected to vary according to local climatic conditions but also the socioeconomic characteristics of farming households. The SHIVA research team has been divided into six thematic groups in order to address the different scientific issues : downscaling the regional climate scenario, farm area projections, vulnerability assessments and quantification, vulnerability mapping, hydrological modelling and upscaling, and vulnerability impact assessements. Our approach is multidisciplinary to cater for for numerous inherent themes, and integrated to cater for vulnerability as a dynamic and multidimensional concept. The project 's first results after 10 months of research are presented below

The ACONIT project: an innovative design approach of active flow control for surge prevention in gas turbines

The objective of the ACONIT project is to design, manufacture and test actuators for flow control for an implantation in an aircraft engine. The actuators will fulfil aeronautics requirement in order to increase the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) in this domain. In particular, for the present proposal, one plans to focus on the extension of the stable operating range of axial compressor, allowing thus a reduction of the surge margin through postponing the stall onset. To do so, the first objective of the work is to improve the knowledge of the flow physics of an efficient flow control system by joint numerical and experimental analyses performed in a low speed, single stage axial compressor. The results of this analysis will be used to derive the fluidic specifications for high-TRL actuators and control systems. These specifications will be the base for the design and manufacturing of amplified piezo-electric actuator prototypes whose fluidic performance and operational performance in an environment with vibration and controlled level of temperature will be precisely evaluated before manufacturing final actuators that will be integrated in a full-scale engine test facility. Their performance will be evaluated in terms of Surge Margin Improvement (SMI) as well as in terms of energy balance between the induced consumption and the machine performance improvements. The consortium grouped for carrying out this project is composed of a SME (CTEC), two academic institutions (Bundeswehr University Munich and ENSAM) and a Research Centre (ONERA). It groups skills ranging from internal flow analysis in turbomachinery, to flow control or actuators design, manufacturing and characterisations.This project (ACONIT Project) has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 88635