Global climate change and variability have a negative impact on a water supply and quality in remote areas by reducing water availability and contaminant dilution. This will continue to be exacerbated by limited and inadequate water supply, insufficient water treatment and low infrastructure. Thus, an economic desalination system with a small scale and footprint for such regions is strongly dem...

An open challenge in information distillation is the evaluation and optimization of the utility of ranked lists with respect to flexible user interactions over multiple sessions. Utility depends on both the relevance and novelty of documents, and the novelty in turn depends on the user interaction history. However, user behavior is non-deterministic. We propose a new probabilistic framework for...

Production of ethyl dodecanoate (biodiesel) using lauric acid and methanol with a solid acid catalyst of sulfated zirconia is studied by using two distillation sequences. In the first sequence, the methanol recovery column follows the reactive distillation column. In the second sequence, the reactive distillation and methanol recovery columns are thermally coupled. Thermally coupled distillatio...

Extractive distillation is an alternative for ethanol dehydration processes that has been shown to be more effective than azeotropic distillation and, in close proximity, to be very competitive against the process that uses adsorption with molecular sieves. Glycols have been shown to be the most effective solvents in extractive distillation, mainly ethylene glycol and glycerol. In this work, an...

Fault diagnosis has always been an essential aspect of control system design. This is necessary due to the growing demand for increased performance and safety of industrial systems is discussed. Support vector machine classifier is a new technique based on statistical learning theory and is designed to reduce structural bias. Support vector machine classification in many applications in v...

Through implementing environmental Directives, Europe has moved towards coordinated and integrated catchment-to-coast management, following the most novel legislation on ecosystem-based approaches worldwide. The novel joint synthesis of this direction reviewed here allows us to regard the Water Framework Directive (WFD) as a 'deconstructing structural approach' whereas the Marine Strategy Frame...