Carbon capture in the cement industry: technologies, progress, and retrofitting

Several different carbon-capture technologies have been proposed for use in the cement industry. This paper reviews their attributes, the progress that has been made toward their commercialization, and the major challenges facing their retrofitting to existing cement plants. A technology readiness level (TRL) scale for carbon capture in the cement industry is developed. For application at cement plants, partial oxy-fuel combustion, amine scrubbing, and calcium looping are the most developed (TRL 6 being the pilot system demonstrated in relevant environment), followed by direct capture (TRL 4–5 being the component and system validation at lab-scale in a relevant environment) and full oxy-fuel combustion (TRL 4 being the component and system validation at lab-scale in a lab environment). Our review suggests that advancing to TRL 7 (demonstration in plant environment) seems to be a challenge for the industry, representing a major step up from TRL 6. The important attributes that a cement plant must have to be “carbon-capture ready” for each capture technology selection is evaluated. Common requirements are space around the preheater and precalciner section, access to CO2 transport infrastructure, and a retrofittable preheater tower. Evidence from the electricity generation sector suggests that carbon capture readiness is not always cost-effective. The similar durations of cement-plant renovation and capture-plant construction suggests that synchronizing these two actions may save considerable time and money

The statistics of the trajectory in a certain billiard in a flat two-torus

We consider a billiard in the punctured torus obtained by removing a small disk from the two-dimensional flat torus, with trajectory starting from the center of the puncture. In this case the phase space is given by the range of the velocity only. We prove that the probability measures on $[0,\infty)$ associated with the first exit time are weakly convergent when the size of the puncture tends to zero and explicitly compute the density of the limit.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

Improving Software Reliability Forecasting

This work investigates some methods for software reliability forecasting. A supermodel is presented as a suited tool for prediction of reliability in software project development. Also, times series forecasting for cumulative interfailure time is proposed and illustrated

A HOLISTIC APPROACH OF RELATIONSHIP MARKETING IN LAUNCHING LUXURY NEW PRODUCTS

On the basis of increased complexity of the exchange mechanism, at the beginning of the third millennium the contemporary marketing suffers some physiognomic changes. Holistic orientation of the contemporary marketing is imposed by the new dimensions therelationship marketing, holistic marketing, luxury marketing, residential complex, research on perception of luxury

Accommodations and English Learners: Inconsistencies in Policies and Practice

This article outlines the results of a survey of all the large-scale testing accommodations used with English learners across the United States, addressing the increasing challenge of integrating this population into a state’s accountability system in a valid and reliable manner. This examination of accommodation policies used in standardized content area assessments reveals that there is little consistency across states with regard to testing accommodations for ELs in providing accommodations when ELs are tested in academic content areas

Does education make voters more leftist or more rightist?: a West vs. East cross-regional analysis

Education is one of the most important determinants of political preferences and voting behavior. However, the direction of this impact is not universal. In a less developed, post-communist polity like Romania, education is negatively correlated with support for the left. In a post-industrial democracy like France, increased education translates into more support for the moderate left (i.e., the "post-materialist" left, Socialists and Ecologists). We explain these differences as the joint effect of recent historical experiences and the current level of economic, social and political development of the two polities

On the distribution of the free path length of the linear flow in a honeycomb

Let $\ell \geq 2$ be an integer. For each \eps >0 remove from $\R^2$ the union of discs of radius \eps centered at the integer lattice points $(m,n$, with m\nequiv n\mod{\ell}. Consider a point-like particle moving linearly at unit speed, with velocity $\omega$, along a trajectory starting at the origin, and its free path length \tau_{\ell,\eps} (\omega)\in [0,\infty]. We prove the weak convergence of the probability measures associated with the random variables \eps \tau_{\ell,\eps} as \eps \to 0^+ and explicitly compute the limiting distribution. For $\ell=3$ this leads to an asymptotic formula for the length of the trajectory of a billiard in a regular hexagon, starting at the center, with circular pockets of radius \eps\to 0^+ removed from the corners. For $\ell=2$ this corresponds to the trajectory of a billiard in a unit square with circular pockets removed from the corners and trajectory starting at the center of the square. The limiting probability measures on $[0,\infty)$ have a tail at infinity, which contrasts with the case of a square with pockets and trajectory starting from one of the corners, where the limiting probability measure has compact support.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure