Competitiveness of renewable energies. Comparison of major European countries

This paper aims at presenting the support schemes promoting the development of renewable energies in five major European countries, namely Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. At first the reader will find brief country profiles, followed by a comparison of their competitiveness with regard to the type of public support available for project developers, the current level of feed-in tariffs, the stability of the regulatory framework, the quality of the wind or solar resource available, etc. Finally, a mapping will give a quick overview of the competitiveness of the five countries for each renewable energy reviewed in this study. The paper focuses on four technologies generating electricity from renewable sources: Onshore wind, Offshore wind, Photovoltaic solar energy and Concentrating solar power ('CSP', also known as solar thermoelectric power). --

View Selection in Semantic Web Databases

We consider the setting of a Semantic Web database, containing both explicit data encoded in RDF triples, and implicit data, implied by the RDF semantics. Based on a query workload, we address the problem of selecting a set of views to be materialized in the database, minimizing a combination of query processing, view storage, and view maintenance costs. Starting from an existing relational view selection method, we devise new algorithms for recommending view sets, and show that they scale significantly beyond the existing relational ones when adapted to the RDF context. To account for implicit triples in query answers, we propose a novel RDF query reformulation algorithm and an innovative way of incorporating it into view selection in order to avoid a combinatorial explosion in the complexity of the selection process. The interest of our techniques is demonstrated through a set of experiments.Comment: VLDB201

Homogeneous deposition of particles by absorption on hydrogels

When a drop containing colloidal particles evaporates on a surface, a circular stain made of these particles is often observed due to an internal flow toward the contact line. To hinder this effect, several approaches have been proposed such as flow modification by addition of surfactants or control of the interactions between the particles. All of these strategies involve the liquid phase while maintaining the drying process. However, substitution of evaporation by absorption into the substrate of the solvent has been investigated less. Here, we show that a droplet containing colloidal particles deposited on swelling hydrogels can lead to a nearly uniform coating. We report experiments and theory to explore the relation between the gel swelling, uniformity of deposition and the adsorption dynamics of the particles at the substrate. Our findings suggest that draining the solvent by absorption provides a robust route to homogeneous coatings

Performance of piezoelectric shunts for vibration reduction

This work addresses passive reduction of structural vibration by means of shunted piezoelectric patches. The two classical resistive and resonant shunt solutions are considered. The main goal of this paper is to give closed-form solutions to systematically estimate the damping performances of the shunts, in the two cases of free and forced vibrations, whatever the elastic host structure is. Then it is carefully demonstrated that the performance of the shunt, in terms of vibration reduction, depends on only one free parameter: the so-called modal electromechanical coupling factor (MEMCF) of the mechanical vibration mode to which the shunts are tuned. Experiments are proposed and an excellent agreement with the model is obtained, thus validating it

RDFViewS: A Storage Tuning Wizard for RDF Applications

In recent years, the significant growth of RDF data used in numerous applications has made its efficient and scalable manipulation an important issue. In this paper, we present RDFViewS, a system capable of choosing the most suitable views to materialize, in order to minimize the query response time for a specific SPARQL query workload, while taking into account the view maintenance cost and storage space constraints. Our system employs practical algorithms and heuristics to navigate through the search space of potential view configurations, and exploits the possibly available semantic information - expressed via an RDF Schema - to ensure the completeness of the query evaluation