Soil moisture satellite mission accuracy, repeat time and spatial resolution requirements are addressed through a numerical twin data assimilation study. Simulated soil moisture profile retrievals were made by assimilating near-surface soil moisture observations with various accuracy (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10%v/v standard deviation) repeat time (1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 days), and spatial r...

Polypyrrole (Ppy) was synthesized using Ferric Chloride (FeCl3) as oxidant. The ratio of monomer to oxidant was 1:2.4. The polymerization was carried out at 5 ̊C. Attempts were made to increase the electrical conductivity by using various dopants viz. Lithium per Chlorate (LiClO4), para-Toluene Sulfonate (p-TS) and Napthalene Sulfonic acid (NSA). The materials were characterized using FTIR, X-Ra...

The Basic Electricity Support Tariff (BEST) was designed to advance the welfare of poor households (UCT 2002). Specifically the South African government chose to supply 50kWh Free Basic Electricity (FBE) per month per household. We illustrate an alternative that would cost less, with larger benefits for the poor. By offering electricity for free, FBE distorts the energy choices of poor househol...

To achieve sustainable development, governments have increasingly turned to legislating new rights, restrictions and responsibilities over land. These laws are designed to control the community’s behaviour in relation to land. Examples include the creation of tradeable water rights and the reallocation of land to indigenous peoples. Whilst the new interests aim to improve land management, they ...

The paper addresses the problem of plan repair for tasks involving mandatory constraints on consumable and continuous resources, modeled as numeric fluents. The approach starts by proposing a new notion of numeric macro actions allowing to handle as an extension to the classical macro action formulation conditions and operations not only on the propositional fragment, but also on the numeric on...

An optical fiber transducer able to work in high temperature environments is experimentally demonstrated in the laboratory. It is based on a permanent long period grating (LPG) written using a new technique based on a thermo-mechanical approach. Device precision was experimentally checked by means of repetitive thermal cycles between 25 and 950 °C. In addition device stability was assured by ma...

Wireless sensor network (WSN) enhanced the process of monitoring many environmental phenomena such as the air pollution monitoring issue in proposed this paper. In this paper, a WSN based microcontroller equipped with gas sensors have been actively used for air quality monitoring. The design included several units mainly: Arduino Microcontroller, MQ-2 Gas Sensors, and the current regulator circ...

A computer based model has been developed by HSE for quantified risk assessment of above ground LPG installaty ions, initially for vessels up to 300 te. A representative set of events and their associated frequencies has been used to predict individual and societal risk levels. Sensitivity studies indicate that the BLEVE event frequency and, to a lesser extent, fireball mass have most significa...

Thermal performance of three different types of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) domestic cooking burners, i.e. a conventional radial flow, a vertical flow and a swirling flow were analyzed by means of Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). PI V diagnostics can explain the burners’ performance from their corresponding flow fields at an impingement area. With the difference of flow patterns, larger atta...

In this paper, the control scheme of a Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG)–diesel dual-fuel engine with electronic control is illustrated, the external characteristics and load characteristics of the LPG– diesel dual-fuel engine and the diesel engine are compared and analyzed. The experimental results show that, compared with diesel, the output performance of dual fuel is not reduced, while smoke emi...