We measured the presence, viability and potential toxicity of cyanobacteria in ships’ ballast tanks during three domestic voyages through the North American Great Lakes. Using molecular methods, the toxin-producing forms of Microcystis and Anabaena were monitored in ballast water after ships’ ballast tanks were filled at their first port of call, and at subsequent ports as ships transited the G...

Biological invasions have the potential to cause extensive ecological and economic damage. Maritime trade facilitates biological invasions by transferring species in ballast water, and on ships' hulls. With volumes of maritime trade increasing globally, efforts to prevent these biological invasions are of significant importance. Both the International Maritime Organization and the Australian go...

ships’ ballast water has apparently enabled numerous species to expand their ranges to environments in which they did not evolve (Carlton 1998; Cohen and Carlton, 1998; Ruiz et al., 2000). In normal trading operations, ships load seawater ballast in one port, then discard it at another in exchange for cargo. Modern international voyages span just a few days or weeks, affording entrained organis...

Organisms, including Vibrio cholerae, can be transferred between harbors in the ballast water of ships. Zones in the Caribbean region where distance from shore and water depth meet International Maritime Organization guidelines for ballast water exchange are extremely limited. Use of ballast water treatment systems could mitigate the risk for organism transfer.

Most harmful diatoms belong to the marine, planktonic genus Pseudo-nitzschia and are responsible for amnesic shellfish poisoning through the production of domoic acid. Fifteen Pseudo-nitzschia species, nine of them toxigenic (approximately 60% of the species found in our samples) were recovered from 185 ship ballast tanks (water and sediment) destined for Canadian ports. Our results demonstrate...

A novel single-stage push–pull electronic ballast with high input power factor is presented in this paper. The proposed electronic ballast combines the front-end power-factor corrector and push–pull converter into a single-stage converter. Compared to the single-stage class-D electronic ballast, the proposed circuit does not require an isolated driver. The control of the circuit is easier and t...

A novel ballast resistor network is proposed to achieve a better thermal management in HBT power cells without degrading the RF performances. Experiments were conducted on two HBT power amplifiers. They occupy same area. One was designed using conventional ballast network. The other uses proposed novel network. Temperature comparisons were made based on the same current density. Infrared camera...

In North America, most rail corridors are constructed using ballasted track. Monitoring the ballast support condition and improving upon current sub-structure/ballast maintenance strategies will ensure safe railroad operations. However, it is inherently difficult to evaluate the pressure distribution at the sleeperballast interface. Researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIU...

As implementation of the Ballast Water Convention draws nearer a major challenge is the development of protocols which accurately assess compliance with the D-2 Standard. Many factors affect the accuracy of assessment: e.g. large volume of ballast water, the shape, size and number of ballast tanks and the heterogeneous distribution of organisms within tanks. These factors hinder efforts to obta...