The Greenland ice sheet presently accounts for ~70% of global ice sheet mass loss. Because this mass loss is associated with sea-level rise at a rate of 0.7 mm/year, the development of improved monitoring techniques to observe ongoing changes in ice sheet mass balance is of paramount concern. Spaceborne mass balance techniques are commonly used; however, they are inadequate for many purposes be...

The present treatise aims at deriving a general framework for the thermodynamics of open systems typically encountered in chemoor biomechanical applications. Due to the fact that an open system is allowed to constantly gain or lose mass, the classical conservation law of mass has to be recast into a balance equation balancing the rate of change of the current mass with a possible inor outflux o...

A simple model using upper-air meteorological variables in the NCEP-NCAR Reanalysis database is used to model seasonal components of mass balance of three glaciers in Svalbard. The model was originally developed for glaciers in North America, and has been applied to glaciers in Norway, Sweden and Iceland. Over the period for which mass balance data are available for the three Svalbard glaciers,...

Landslides, like other natural hazards, such as avalanches, floods, and debris flows, may result in a lot of property damage and human casualties. The volume of landslide deposits is a key parameter for landslide studies and disaster relief. Using remote sensing and digital terrain model (DTM) data, this paper analyzes errors that can occur in calculating landslide volumes using conventional mo...

Closing carbon mass balances is a critical and necessary step for verifying the performance of any conversion process. We developed a methodology for calculating carbon mass balance closures for a cellulase production process and then applied measurement uncertainty analysis to calculate 95% confidence limits to assess the accuracy of the results. Cellulase production experiments were conducted...

The aim of these lecture notes is to give a self content presentation of the modelling of engineering systems that are governed by a law of mass conservation and to briefly discuss some control problems regarding these systems. Modelling issues are first addressed in Sections 2 to 11. The general statespace model of mass balance systems is presented. The equations of the model are shown to sati...