Ballast water discharge from ships has been the most important vector for introducing nonindigenous species to the Laurentian Great Lakes, and is responsible for many of the most ecologically and economically disruptive invasions in the basin (Mills et al. 1993, Ricciardi 2006). In an attempt to limit further invasions, ships entering the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River system with ballast water...

As a vector by which foreign species invade coastal and freshwater waterbodies, ballast water discharge from ships is recognized as a major environmental threat. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) drafted an international treaty establishing ballast water discharge standards based on the number of viable organisms per volume of ballast discharge for different organism size classes. C...

A spatial and temporal numerical simulation has been carried out of a pulsed (100% modulated), rf inductively coupled plasma discharge in argon, connected to an additional (ballast) diffusion chamber of much larger volume. It is demonstrated that during the active phase, the presence of the large ballast volume has a small impact on the parameters of the plasma in the smaller discharge chamber....

Ballast is a porous layer that reduces the effective contact surface between sleeper and ballast. Also, does not have smooth bottom surface, which causes reduction of ballast particles. At field experiments, by installing sensitive papers under sleepers track, cyclic load was imposed passing trains, after certain amount loads, pressure paper removed, measured while in laboratory investigation, ...

In this paper will be reported the implementation of a flexible platform to study electronic ballasts systems. The platform is a microcontrolled and FPGA-based system and was developed to generate command signals to the half bridge inverter. A specific hardware using FPGA was developed to generate the switches signals command. This hardware is responsible for the autonomous frequency (FM) and p...

Historically, hull fouling associated with slow-moving, wooden-hulled vessels has been recognized as the primary transport mechanism responsible for the dispersal of non-indigenous marine species (NIMS) around the world and the fouling of hulls may have contributed significantly to the current patterns of bi-ogeographic distributions of many marine organisms (e.g., Carlton and Hodder, 1995). Ov...

A literature search was conducted to summarize studies that quantified the efficacy of ballast water exchange. Here, a number of parameters were collated from 68 studies to provide a meta-analysis of the efficacy of exchange. The percent removal of ballast water, organisms, and various physical parameters was investigated to quantify exchange efficacy in terms of volumetric, biological, and wat...