Natural waste materials containing chitin as adsorbents for textile dyestuffs: batch and continuous studies

In this work three natural waste materials containing chitin were used as adsorbents for textile dyestuffs, namely the Anodonta (Anodonta cygnea) shell, the Sepia (Sepia officinalis) and the Squid (Loligo vulgaris) pens. The selected dyestuffs were the Cibacron green T3G-E (CI reactive green 12), and the Solophenyl green BLE 155% (CI direct green 26), both from CIBA, commonly used in cellulosic fibres dyeing, the most used fibres in the textile industry. Batch equilibrium studies showed that the materials’ adsorption capacities increase after a simple and inexpensive chemical treatment, which increases their porosity and chitin relative content. Kinetic studies suggested the existence of a high internal resistance in both systems. Fixed bed column experiments performed showed an improvement in adsorbents’ behaviour after chemical treatment. However, in the column experiments, the biodegradation was the main mechanism of dyestuff removal, allowing the materials’ bioregeneration. The adsorption was strongly reduced by the pore clogging effect of the biomass. The deproteinised Squid pen (grain size 0.500–1.41 mm) is the adsorbent with highest adsorption capacity (0.27 and 0.037 g/g, respectively, for the reactive and direct dyestuffs, at 20ºC), followed by the demineralised Sepia pen and Anodonta shell, behaving like pure chitin in all experiments, but showing inferior performances than the granular activated carbon tested in the column experiments.

Stability of fractional order systems

The theory and applications of fractional calculus (FC) had a considerable progress during the last years. Dynamical systems and control are one of the most active areas, and several authors focused on the stability of fractional order systems. Nevertheless, due to the multitude of efforts in a short period of time, contributions are scattered along the literature, and it becomes difficult for researchers to have a complete and systematic picture of the present day knowledge. This paper is an attempt to overcome this situation by reviewing the state of the art and putting this topic in a systematic form. While the problem is formulated with rigour, from the mathematical point of view, the exposition intends to be easy to read by the applied researchers. Different types of systems are considered, namely, linear/nonlinear, positive, with delay, distributed, and continuous/discrete. Several possible routes of future progress that emerge are also tackled.

INDEPTH: timeliness assessment of ethernet/IP-based systems

The continuous improvement of Ethernet technologies is boosting the eagerness of extending their use to cover factory-floor distributed real time applications. Indeed, it is remarkable the considerable amount of research work that has been devoted to the timing analysis of Ethernet-based technologies in the past few years. It happens, however, that the majority of those works are restricted to the analysis of sub-sets of the overall computing and communication system, thus without addressing timeliness in a holistic fashion. To this end, we address an approach, based on simulation, aiming at extracting temporal properties of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Ethernet-based factory-floor distributed systems. This framework is applied to a specific COTS technology, Ethernet/IP. We reason about the modeling and simulation of Ethernet/IP-based systems, and on the use of statistical analysis techniques to provide useful results on timeliness. The approach is part of a wider framework related to the research project INDEPTH NDustrial-Ethernet ProTocols under Holistic analysis.

Cantor exchange systems and renormalization

We prove a one-to-one correspondence between (i) C1+ conjugacy classes of C1+H Cantor exchange systems that are C1+H fixed points of renormalization and (ii) C1+ conjugacy classes of C1+H diffeomorphisms f with a codimension 1 hyperbolic attractor Lambda that admit an invariant measure absolutely continuous with respect to the Hausdorff measure on Lambda. However, we prove that there is no C1+alpha Cantor exchange system, with bounded geometry, that is a C1+alpha fixed point of renormalization with regularity alpha greater than the Hausdorff dimension of its invariant Cantor set.

Arc exchange systems and renormalization

We exhibit the construction of stable arc exchange systems from the stable laminations of hyperbolic diffeomorphisms. We prove a one-to-one correspondence between (i) Lipshitz conjugacy classes of C(1+H) stable arc exchange systems that are C(1+H) fixed points of renormalization and (ii) Lipshitz conjugacy classes of C(1+H) diffeomorphisms f with hyperbolic basic sets Lambda that admit an invariant measure absolutely continuous with respect to the Hausdorff measure on Lambda. Let HD(s)(Lambda) and HD(u)(Lambda) be, respectively, the Hausdorff dimension of the stable and unstable leaves intersected with the hyperbolic basic set L. If HD(u)(Lambda) = 1, then the Lipschitz conjugacy is, in fact, a C(1+H) conjugacy in (i) and (ii). We prove that if the stable arc exchange system is a C(1+HDs+alpha) fixed point of renormalization with bounded geometry, then the stable arc exchange system is smooth conjugate to an affine stable arc exchange system.

Adaptive offloading for infotainment systems

Infotainment applications in vehicles are currently supported both by the in-vehicle platform, as well as by user’s smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets. More and more the user expects that there is a continuous service of applications inside or outside of the vehicle, provided in any of these devices (a simple but common example is hands-free mobile phone calls provided by the vehicle platform). With the increasing complexity of ‘apps’, it is necessary to support increasing levels of Quality of Service (QoS), with varying resource requirements. Users may want to start listening to music in the smartphone, or video in the tablet, being this application transparently ‘moved’ into the vehicle when it is started. This paper presents an adaptable offloading mechanism, following a service-oriented architecture pattern, which takes into account the QoS requirements of the applications being executed when making decisions.

Multi-agent simulation of competitive electricity markets: Autonomous systems cooperation for European market modeling

The electricity market restructuring, and its worldwide evolution into regional and even continental scales, along with the increasing necessity for an adequate integration of renewable energy sources, is resulting in a rising complexity in power systems operation. Several power system simulators have been developed in recent years with the purpose of helping operators, regulators, and involved players to understand and deal with this complex and constantly changing environment. The main contribution of this paper is given by the integration of several electricity market and power system models, respecting to the reality of different countries. This integration is done through the development of an upper ontology which integrates the essential concepts necessary to interpret all the available information. The continuous development of Multi-Agent System for Competitive Electricity Markets platform provides the means for the exemplification of the usefulness of this ontology. A case study using the proposed multi-agent platform is presented, considering a scenario based on real data that simulates the European Electricity Market environment, and comparing its performance using different market mechanisms. The main goal is to demonstrate the advantages that the integration of various market models and simulation platforms have for the study of the electricity markets’ evolution.