Vanadium Redox Flow Battery Storage System Linked to the Electric Grid

This paper focuses on technology state of the art for the charge/discharge of electric energy storage supported by vanadium redox flow battery linked to the electric grid. Properties of vanadium, the main configuration and the reaction of charge/discharge of a vanadium redox flow battery are addressed. The vanadium redox flow battery has the highest cell voltage among the other redox flow battery, implying higher power and energy density which favours application at power plants. This electric energy storage is viewed as a promising contribution to be integrated in power system due to a reasonably bulky size and to successful applications currently allowing storage of energy at power plants or at electrical grids. For instances, allowing storage of energy as an economic improvement providing spin reserve to avoid penalty for imbalances between the energy delivered and energy contracted at closing of electricity market or as an economic improvement to diminish the cost of electricity usage of a consumer. The vanadium redox flow battery has the advantages of scalability customized to meet requirements for power and energy capacity and of excellent combination of energy efficiency, capital cost and life cycle costs compared with other technology.

Towards Conservation Agriculture systems in Moldova

As the world population and food production demands rise, keeping agricultural soils and landscapes healthy and productive are of paramount importance to sustaining local and global food security and the flow of ecosystem services to society. The global population, expected to reach 9.7 billion people by 2050, will put additional pressure on the available land area and resources for agricultural production. Sustainable production intensification for food security is a major challenge to both industrialized and developing countries. The paper focuses on the results from long-term multi-factorial experiments involving tillage practices, crop rotations and fertilization to study the interactions amongst the treatments in the context of sustainable production intensification. The paper discusses the results in relation to reported performance of crops and soil quality in Conservation Agriculture systems that are based on no or minimum soil disturbance (no-till seeding and weeding), maintenance of soil mulch cover with crop biomass and cover crops, and diversified cropping systems involving annuals and perennials. Conservation Agriculture also emphasizes the necessity of an agro-ecosystems approach to the management of agricultural land for sustainable production intensification, as well as to the site-specificity of agricultural production. Arguments in favor of avoiding the use of soil tillage are discussed together with agro-ecological principles for sustainable intensification of agriculture. More interdisciplinary systems research is required to support the transformation of agriculture from the conventional tillage agriculture to a more sustainable agriculture based on the principles and practices of Conservation Agriculture, along with other complementary practices of integrated crop, nutrient, water, pest, energy and farm power management.

An integrated library system on the CERN document server

O CERN - a Organização Europeia para a Investigação Nuclear - é um dos maiores centros de investigação a nível mundial, responsável por diversas descobertas na área da física bem como na área das ciências da computação. O CERN Document Server, também conhecido como CDS Invenio, é um software desenvolvido no CERN, que tem como objectivo fornecer um conjunto de ferramentas para gerir bibliotecas digitais. A fim de melhorar as funcionalidades do CDS Invenio foi criado um novo módulo, chamado BibCirculation, para gerir os livros (e outros itens) da biblioteca do CERN, funcionando como um sistema integrado de gestão de bibliotecas. Esta tese descreve os passos que foram dados para atingir os vários objectivos deste projecto, explicando, entre outros, o processo de integração com os outros módulos existentes bem como a forma encontrada para associar informações dos livros com os metadados do CDS lnvenio. É também possível encontrar uma apresentação detalhada sobre todo o processo de implementação e os testes realizados. Finalmente, são apresentadas as conclusões deste projecto e o trabalho a desenvolver futuramente. ABSTRACT: CERN - The European Organization for Nuclear Research - is one of the largest research centers worldwide, responsible for several discoveries in physics as well as in computer science. The CERN Document Server, also known as CDS Invenio, is a software developed at CERN, which aims to provide a set of tools for managing digital libraries. ln order to improve the functionalities of CDS Invenio a new module was developed, called BibCirculation, to manage books (and other items) from the CERN library, and working as an Integrated Library System. This thesis shows the steps that have been done to achieve the several goals of this project, explaining, among others aspects, the process of integration with other existing modules as well as the way to associate the information about books with the metadata from CDS lnvenio. You can also find detailed explanation of the entire implementation process and testing. Finally, there are presented the conclusions of this project and ideas for future development.