Aplicació de l'ACV a l'envasat del vi : "Bag in Box" front a l'envàs de vidre tradicional

L’objectiu d’aquest projecte és la comparació, des del punt de vista ambiental, de l’envasat del vi mitjançant ampolles de vidre i mitjançant el sistema “Bag-in-Box” reutilitzable.

The Black Box of Business Dynamics

Research in business dynamics has been advancing rapidly in the last years but the translation of the new knowledge to industrial policy design is slow. One striking aspect in the policy area is that although research and analysis do not identify the existence of an specific optimal rate of business creation and business exit, governments everywhere have adopted business start-up support programs with the implicit principle that the more the better. The purpose of this article is to contribute to understand the implications of the available research for policy design. Economic analysis has identified firm heterogeneity as being the most salient characteristic of industrial dynamics, and so a better knowledge of the different types of entrepreneur, their behavior and their specific contribution to innovation and growth would enable us to see into the ‘black box’ of business dynamics and improve the design of appropriate public policies. The empirical analysis performed here shows that not all new business have the same impact on relevant economic variables, and that self-employment is of quite a different economic nature to that of firms with employees. It is argued that public programs should not promote indiscriminate entry but rather give priority to able entrants with survival capacities. Survival of entrants is positively related to their size at birth. Innovation and investment improve the likelihood of survival of new manufacturing start-ups. Investment in R&D increases the risk of failure in new firms, although it improves the competitiveness of incumbents.

Re-opening the black box in societal metabolism: the application of MuSIASEM to water

In this paper we address the complexity of the analysis of water use in relation to the issue of sustainability. In fact, the flows of water in our planet represent a complex reality which can be studied using many different perceptions and narratives referring to different scales and dimensions of analysis. For this reason, a quantitative analysis of water use has to be based on analytical methods that are semantically open: they must be able to define what we mean with the term “water” when crossing different scales of analysis. We propose here a definition of water as a resource that deal with the many services it provides to humans and ecosystems. WE argue that water can fulfil so many of them since the element has many characteristics that allow for the resource to be labelled with different attributes, depending on the end use –such as drinkable. Since the services for humans and the functions for ecosystems associated with water flows are defined on different scales but still interconnected it is necessary to organize our assessment of water use across different hierarchical levels. In order to do so we define how to approach the study of water use in the Societal Metabolism, by proposing the Water Metabolism, tganized in three levels: societal level, ecosystem level and global level. The possible end uses we distinguish for the society are: personal/physiological use, household use, economic use. Organizing the study of “water use” across all these levels increases the usefulness of the quantitative analysis and the possibilities of finding relevant and comparable results. To achieve this result, we adapted a method developed to deal with multi-level, multi-scale analysis - the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) approach - to the analysis of water metabolism. In this paper, we discuss the peculiar analytical identity that “water” shows within multi-scale metabolic studies: water represents a flow-element when considering the metabolism of social systems (at a small scale, when describing the water metabolism inside the society) and a fund-element when considering the metabolism o ecosystems (at a larger scale when describing the water metabolism outside the society). The theoretical analysis is illustrated using two case which characterize the metabolic patterns regarding water use of a productive system in Catalonia and a water management policy in Andarax River Basin in Andalusia.

An Analysis of black-box optimization problems in reinsurance: evolutionary-based approaches

Black-box optimization problems (BBOP) are de ned as those optimization problems in which the objective function does not have an algebraic expression, but it is the output of a system (usually a computer program). This paper is focussed on BBOPs that arise in the eld of insurance, and more speci cally in reinsurance problems. In this area, the complexity of the models and assumptions considered to de ne the reinsurance rules and conditions produces hard black-box optimization problems, that must be solved in order to obtain the optimal output of the reinsurance. The application of traditional optimization approaches is not possible in BBOP, so new computational paradigms must be applied to solve these problems. In this paper we show the performance of two evolutionary-based techniques (Evolutionary Programming and Particle Swarm Optimization). We provide an analysis in three BBOP in reinsurance, where the evolutionary-based approaches exhibit an excellent behaviour, nding the optimal solution within a fraction of the computational cost used by inspection or enumeration methods.

Nucleation of diamond on silicon, SiAlON, and graphite substrates coated with an a-C:H layer

We investigated the influence of a hydrogenated disordered carbon (a-C:H) layer on the nucleation of diamond. Substrates c-Si<100>, SiAlON, and highly oriented pyrolytic graphite {0001} were used in this study. The substrate surfaces were characterized with Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) while diamond growth was followed with Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). It was found that on silicon and SiAlON substrates the presence of the a-C:H layer enabled diamond to grow readily without any polishing treatment. Moreover, more continuous diamond films could be grown when the substrate was polished with diamond powder prior to the deposition of the a-C:H layer. This important result suggests that the nucleation of diamond occurs readily on disordered carbon surfaces, and that the formation of this type of layer is indeed one step in the diamond nucleation mechanism. Altogether, the data refute the argument that silicon defects play a direct role in the nucleation process. Auger spectra revealed that for short deposition times and untreated silicon surfaces, the deposited layer corresponds to an amorphous carbon layer. In these cases, the subsequent diamond nucleation was found to be limited. However, when the diamond nucleation density was found to be high; i.e., after lengthy deposits of a¿C:H or after diamond polishing, the Auger spectra suggested diamondlike carbon layers.