Reporting of Green Supply Chain Management and Industrial Symbiosis

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the reporting of operations related to green supply chain management and industrial symbiosis has evolved in UPM, Fortum and Kemira within the last ten years. The focus is on the improved operations, which are studied based on annual reports of these companies. The study provides a deeper understanding of the nature of green supply chain management and industrial symbiosis as well as the possibilites that their combination offers. The research is part of the DemaNET research project The study indicates that the environmental regulations and reporting standards have forced the studied companies to report their operations related to green supply chain management and industrial symbiosis more in detail during the last ten years. The operations related to green supply chain management in the studied companies are more common compared to operations related to industrial symbiosis. Often these two operations were also partially integrated, indicating a hybrid model. Even though firms often used hybrid models they still focused mainly on greening the internal operations rather than finding alternative ways for symbiosis outside the organization. The integration of green supply chain management and industrial symbiosis is most likely to occur when mutually beneficial relationships align the interests of all parties, thus resulting in the co-creation of value. The findings suggest that identifying mutual benefits and the flow of by-products are the ones that companies should give more attention to.

Silicon-containing species in used lube oil re-refining

Nowadays, the re-refining of the used lube oils has gained worldwide a lot of attention due to the necessity for added environmental protection and increasingly stringent environmental legislation. One of the parameters determining the quality of the produced base oils is the composition of feedstock. Estimation of the chemical composition of the used oil collected from several European locations showed that the hydrocarbon structure of the motor oil is changed insignificantly during its operation and the major part of the changes is accounted for with depleted oil additives. In the lube oil re-refining industry silicon, coming mainly from antifoaming agents, is recognized to be a contaminant generating undesired solid deposits in various locations in the re-refining units. In this thesis, a particular attention was paid to the mechanism of solid product formation during the alkali treatment process of silicon-containing used lube oils. The transformations of a model siloxane, tetramethyldisiloxane (TMDS), were studied in a batch reactor at industrially relevant alkali treatment conditions (low temperature, short reaction time) using different alkali agents. The reaction mechanism involving solid alkali metal silanolates was proposed. The experimental data obtained demonstrated that the solids were dominant products at low temperature and short reaction time. The liquid products in the low temperature reactions were represented mainly by linear siloxanes. The prolongation of reaction time resulted in reduction of solids, whereas both temperature and time increase led to dominance of cyclic products in the reaction mixture. Experiments with the varied reaction time demonstrated that the concentration of cyclic trimer being the dominant in the beginning of the reaction diminished with time, whereas the cyclic tetramer tended to increase. Experiments with lower sodium hydroxide concentration showed the same effect. In addition, a decrease of alkali agent concentration in the initial reaction mixture accelerated TMDS transformation reactions resulting in solely liquid cyclic siloxanes yields. Comparison of sodium and potassium hydroxides applied as an alkali agent demonstrated that potassium hydroxide was more efficient, since the activation energy in KOH presence was almost 2-fold lower than that for sodium hydroxide containing reaction mixture. Application of potassium hydroxide for TMDS transformation at 100° C with 3 hours reaction time resulted in 20 % decrease of solid yields compared to NaOH-containing mixture. Moreover, TMDS transformations in the presence of sodium silanolate applied as an alkali agent led to formation of only liquid products without formation of the undesired solids. On the basis of experimental data and the proposed reaction mechanism, a kinetic model was developed, which provided a satisfactory description of the experimental results. Suitability of the selected siloxane as a relevant model of industrial silicon-containing compounds was verified by investigation of the commercially available antifoam agent in base-catalyzed conditions.

Regime-Switching in the Impact of Oil Price Shocks on Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from Oil-Importing and Oil-Exporting Countries

Research has highlighted the adequacy of Markov regime-switching model to address dynamic behavior in long term stock market movements. Employing a purposed Extended regime-switching GARCH(1,1) model, this thesis further investigates the regime dependent nonlinear relationship between changes in oil price and stock market volatility in Saudi Arabia, Norway and Singapore for the period of 2001-2014. Market selection is prioritized to national dependency on oil export or import, which also rationalizes the fitness of implied bivariate volatility model. Among two regimes identified by the mean model, high stock market return-low volatility regime reflects the stable economic growth periods. The other regime characterized by low stock market return-high volatility coincides with episodes of recession and downturn. Moreover, results of volatility model provide the evidence that shocks in stock markets are less persistent during the high volatility regime. While accelerated oil price rises the stock market volatility during recessions, it reduces the stock market risk during normal growth periods in Singapore. In contrast, oil price showed no significant notable impact on stock market volatility of target oil-exporting countries in either of the volatility regime. In light to these results, international investors and policy makers could benefit the risk management in relation to oil price fluctuation.

Green aspects study in game development

Context: Game development has become increasingly important in the software industry, but this importance has not affected the way software engineering approaches and methodologies manage the differences they have with game development. Similarly, software engineering does not fully support sustainability practices, causing this element to often not be considered or even known as a requirement for a development lifecycle. Goal: The aim of this thesis is to study the mode in which games are developed, and the involved sustainable aspects and the relevant concerns regarding the migration processes. Method: A quantitative study was conducted, gathering 33 answers of game professionals from four continents, from administrative (25%) and technical oriented positions (75%). Results: Three trends were observed: 1) Agile process models are used, 2) major concerns for mobile development and digital marketing, 3) minor concerns for eco-impact elements and certain development phases such as testing and crunch time development. Conclusion: Traditional Software engineering would require a major change on its processes and models to fit with modern agile development, game development approaches and sustainable requirements.

Green welding in practice

Efficient production and consumption of energy has become the top priority of national and international policies around the world. Manufacturing industries have to address the requirements of the government in relation to energy saving and ecologically sustainable products. These industries are also concerned with energy and material usage due to their rising costs. Therefore industries have to find solutions that can support environmental preservation yet maintain competitiveness in the market. Welding, a major manufacturing process, consumes a great deal of material and energy. It is a crucial process in improving a product’s life-cycle cost, strength, quality and reliability. Factors which lead to weld related inefficiencies have to be effectively managed, if industries are to meet their quality requirements and fulfil a high-volume production demand. Therefore it is important to consider some practical strategies in welding process for optimization of energy and material consumption. The main objective of this thesis is to explore the methods of minimizing the ecological footprint of the welding process and methods to effectively manage its material and energy usage in the welding process. The author has performed a critical review of the factors including improved weld power source efficiency, efficient weld techniques, newly developed weld materials, intelligent welding systems, weld safety measures and personnel training. The study lends strong support to the fact that the use of eco-friendly welding units and the quality weld joints obtained with minimum possible consumption of energy and materials should be the main directions of improvement in welding systems. The study concludes that, gradually implementing the practical strategies mentioned in this thesis would help the manufacturing industries to achieve on the following - reduced power consumption, enhanced power control and manipulation, increased deposition rate, reduced cycle time, reduced joint preparation time, reduced heat affected zones, reduced repair rates, improved joint properties, reduced post-weld operations, improved automation, improved sensing and control, avoiding hazardous conditions and reduced exposure of welder to potential hazards. These improvement can help in promotion of welding as a green manufacturing process.

Implementing Green IT approach for transferring Big Data over Parallel Data Link

The whole research of the current Master Thesis project is related to Big Data transfer over Parallel Data Link and my main objective is to assist the Saint-Petersburg National Research University ITMO research team to accomplish this project and apply Green IT methods for the data transfer system. The goal of the team is to transfer Big Data by using parallel data links with SDN Openflow approach. My task as a team member was to compare existing data transfer applications in case to verify which results the highest data transfer speed in which occasions and explain the reasons. In the context of this thesis work a comparison between 5 different utilities was done, which including Fast Data Transfer (FDT), BBCP, BBFTP, GridFTP, and FTS3. A number of scripts where developed which consist of creating random binary data to be incompressible to have fair comparison between utilities, execute the Utilities with specified parameters, create log files, results, system parameters, and plot graphs to compare the results. Transferring such an enormous variety of data can take a long time, and hence, the necessity appears to reduce the energy consumption to make them greener. In the context of Green IT approach, our team used Cloud Computing infrastructure called OpenStack. It’s more efficient to allocated specific amount of hardware resources to test different scenarios rather than using the whole resources from our testbed. Testing our implementation with OpenStack infrastructure results that the virtual channel does not consist of any traffic and we can achieve the highest possible throughput. After receiving the final results we are in place to identify which utilities produce faster data transfer in different scenarios with specific TCP parameters and we can use them in real network data links.

Benchmark of routing protocols regarding green considerations

In Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) the participating nodes have several roles such as sender, receiver and router. Hence there is a lot of energy consumed by the nodes for the normal working of the network since each node has many different roles. Also in MANET the nodes keep moving constantly and this in turn consumes a lot of energy. Since battery capacity of these nodes is limited it fails to fulfil the high demand of energy. The scarcity of energy makes the energy conservation in mobile ad-hoc networks an important concern. There is several research carried out on the energy consumption of mobile ad-hoc networks these days. Some of this research suggests sleep mode, transmission power control, load balancing etc. In this thesis, we are comparing various proposed energy efficient models for some of the ad-hoc protocols. We compare different energy efficient models for Optimised Linked State Algorithm (OLSR) and Ad-hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV). The routing protocols are compared for different parameters such as average remaining energy, number of nodes alive, payload data received and performance with different mobility speed. The simulation results helps in benchmarking the various energy efficient routing models for OLSR and AODV protocols. The benchmarking of the routing protocols can be based on many factors but this thesis concentrates on benchmarking the MANET routing protocols mainly based on the energy efficiency and increased network lifetime.

Green Service Level Agreement under Sustainability Lens in IT Industry

Nowadays, when most of the business are moving forward to sustainability by providing or getting different services from different vendors, Service Level Agreement (SLA) becomes very important for both the business providers/vendors and as well as for users/customers. There are many ways to inform users/customers about various services with its inherent execution functionalities and even non-functional/Quality of Services (QoS) aspects through negotiating, evaluating or monitoring SLAs. However, these traditional SLA actually do not cover eco-efficient green issues or IT ethics issues for sustainability. That is why green SLA (GSLA) should come into play. GSLA is a formal agreement incorporating all the traditional commitments as well as green issues and ethics issues in IT business sectors. GSLA research would survey on different traditional SLA parameters for various services like as network, compute, storage and multimedia in IT business areas. At the same time, this survey could focus on finding the gaps and incorporation of these traditional SLA parameters with green issues for all these mentioned services. This research is mainly points on integration of green parameters in existing SLAs, defining GSLA with new green performance indicators and their measurable units. Finally, a GSLA template could define compiling all the green indicators such as recycling, radio-wave, toxic material usage, obsolescence indication, ICT product life cycles, energy cost etc for sustainable development. Moreover, people’s interaction and IT ethics issues such as security and privacy, user satisfaction, intellectual property right, user reliability, confidentiality etc could also need to add for proposing a new GSLA. However, integration of new and existing performance indicators in the proposed GSLA for sustainable development could be difficult for ICT engineers. Therefore, this research also discovers the management complexity of proposed green SLA through designing a general informational model and analyses of all the relationships, dependencies and effects between various newly identified services under sustainability pillars. However, sustainability could only be achieved through proper implementation of newly proposed GSLA, which largely depends on monitoring the performance of the green indicators. Therefore, this research focuses on monitoring and evaluating phase of GSLA indicators through the interactions with traditional basic SLA indicators, which would help to achieve proper implementation of future GSLA. Finally, this newly proposed GSLA informational model and monitoring aspects could definitely help different service providers/vendors to design their future business strategy in this new transitional sustainable society.

Green ICT metrics and Biomimicry

Sustainability issue of ICT have gathered attention in recent years, and researchers are working on this problem. Sustainability incorporates numerous interconnected aspects as well as methods to achieve it in ICT, so it is quite complicated to have a general view on a problem without a proper framework. However, a general methodology for such a research is missing. In this work it is proposed to use Biomimicry approach as a framework for sustainability research and development, as it introduces systematics and also forces to account sustainable aspects. Additionally, an interesting problem of green network measurements for enhancing sustainability in ICT will be researched using mentioned approach. The goal is to investigate Biomimicry as a systemic approach for developing sustainable systems, as well as to apply it in green network measurements study. Comparative study is performed for examining Biomimicry approach, as well as a use case of green network measurements research is presented. As a result, green network measurement can potentially improve sustainability, but only to a limited extent as it cannot incorporate all the aspects; within Biomimicry approach, two methodologies exist. It is possible to conclude that Biomimicry is a good framework for developing sustainable systems, nevertheless, another methodology has to be introduced within it; new methodology has to incorporate advantages of two existing ones.

Determinants of capital expenditures: Evidence from oil and mining sectors in Russia

This master’s thesis investigates the significant macroeconomic and firm level determinants of CAPEX in Russian oil and mining sectors. It also studies the Russian oil and mining sectors, its development, characteristics and current situation. The panel data methodology was implemented to identify the determinants of CAPEX in Russian oil and mining sectors and to test derived hypotheses. The core sample consists of annual financial data of 45 publicly listed Russian oil and mining sector companies. The timeframe of the thesis research is a six year period from 2007 to 2013. The findings of the master’s thesis have shown that Gross Sales, Return On Assets, Free Cash Flow and Long Term Debt are firm level performance variables along with Russian GDP, Export, Urals and the Reserve Fund are macroeconomic variables that determine the magnitude of new capital expenditures reported by publicly listed Russian oil and mining sector companies. These results are not controversial to the previous research paper, indeed they confirm them. Furthermore, the findings from the emerging countries, such as Malaysia, India and Portugal, are analogous to Russia. The empirical research is edifying and novel. Findings from this master’s thesis are highly valuable for the scientific community, especially, for researchers who investigate the determinant of CAPEX in developing countries. Moreover, the results can be utilized as a cogent argument, when companies and investors are doing strategic decisions, considering the Russian oil and mining sectors.

“Good night, dear Lake of Shining Waters”. Luonto L. M. Montgomeryn Anne of Green Gables –teoksessa

Kanadalaisen kirjailijan L. M. Montgomeryn tunnetun ja rakastetun Anna-sarjan ensimmäinen osa Anne of Green Gables -teos (1908) kertoo orvosta tytöstä, joka pääsee Prinssi Edwardin saaren Avonlean kylään asumaan naimattoman sisarusparin Marilla ja Matthew`n kasvattilapseksi. Luonto on keskeisellä sijalla teoksessa: Anna on luontoa rakastava ja luonnon keskellä viihtyvä tyttö ja myös teoksen kertoja kuvaa paljon luontoa. Tutkimukseni käsittelee luontoa Anne of Green Gables -teoksessa. Tutkin luontoteemaa teoksessa seuraavista näkökulmista: Analysoin, kuinka luonto kuvataan teoksessa ja millainen on teoksen luontokuva. Luontokuvaa käsittelen pastoraalin käsitteen kautta, ja kysyn teokselta, voidaanko se tulkita pastoraaliksi ja kuinka teos asettuu pastoraalin traditioon. Lisäksi erittelen, millainen on päähenkilön Annan luontosuhde. Millaisen arvon hän antaa luonnolle ja mitä merkityksiä hän liittää luontoon? Tutkimus asettuu ekokriittiseen viitekehykseen, ja pohdin myös sitä, minkälainen on teoksen representaatio luonnosta ekokriittisesti tarkastellen. Amerikkalaisen transsendentalistin Ralph Waldo Emersonin luontofilosofia kulkee myös taustajuonteena tutkielmassa ja erittelen, mitä yhtymäkohtia hänen luontofilosofiassaan on Anne of Green Gables -teokseen. Anne of Green Gables -teoksen luontokuvaa voidaan luonnehtia romantisoiduksi ja idealisoivaksi. Luonto kuvataan kauniiksi, ja sen kauneutta ylistää niin Anna kuin teoksen kaikkitietävä kertojakin. Teoksen luontokuva on pastoraalinen, sillä siinä esiintyy vahvasti pastoraaliin liittyvä diskurssi maaseudun ja kaupungin vastakkainasettelusta siten, että maaseutu assosioituu positiivisesti, kun taas kaupunki nähdään negatiivisessa valossa. Luonnonläheinen Avonlean kylä näyttäytyy teoksessa niin idealisoidussa valossa, että se muistuttaa jo jonkinlaista myyttistä paratiisia. Näin ollen teoksen pastoraalisuus saa pejoratiivisiakin piirteitä. Annan luontosuhdetta värittää voimakas kunnioitus ja arvostus luontoa kohtaan. Hänen luontoon liittämistä arvoista keskeiselle sijalle nousee luonnon kauneus. Luonnon kauneuden arvostaminen toimii kuitenkin porttina luonnon toiseuttamiseen, mistä syntyy pieni arvoristiriita. Toisaalta kuitenkin Anna samaistuu luontoon tavalla, joka hämärtää perinteistä subjekti–objekti-dikotomiaa. Anna näyttäytyy vihreän maailman arkkityyppinä, lapsena, joka sulautuu luontoon ja kokee sen kodikseen. Luonto edustaa Annalle vapautta ja herättää myös hänen mielikuvituksena ja taiteellisen inspiraation. Lisäksi luonto on Annalle paikka, jossa voi saavuttaa autenttisen yhteyden Jumalaan.

Flow in porous media of oil-water systems

Fluid flow behaviour in porous media is a conundrum. Therefore, this research is focused on filtration-volumetric characterisation of fractured-carbonate sediments, coupled with their proper simulation. For this reason, at laboratory rock properties such as pore volume, permeability and porosity are measured, later phase permeabilities and oil recovery in function of flow rate are assessed. Furthermore, the rheological properties of three oils are measured and analysed. Finally based on rock and fluid properties, a model using COMSOL Multiphysics is built in order to compare the experimental and simulated results. The rock analyses show linear relation between flow rate and differential pressure, from which phase permeabilities and pressure gradient are determined, eventually the oil recovery under low and high flow rate is established. In addition, the oils reveal thixotropic properties as well as non-Newtonian behaviour described by Bingham model, consequently Carreau viscosity model for the used oil is given. Given these points, the model for oil and water is built in COMSOL Multiphysics, whereupon successfully the reciprocity between experimental and simulated results is analysed and compared. Finally, a two-phase displacement model is elaborated.