Avaruusoikeus : kansainvälisen sopimusyhteistyön ja kansallisen sääntelyn kautta EU-harmonisointiin

English summary: Space law - From international co-operation and national regulation to EU harmonisation (s. 688-689)

The European Union and Assembling Biofuel Development – topological investigations concerning the associations between law, policy and space

Biofuels for transport are a renewable source of energy that were once heralded as a solution to multiple problems associated with poor urban air quality, the overproduction of agricultural commodities, the energy security of the European Union (EU) and climate change. It was only after the Union had implemented an incentivizing framework of legal and political instruments for the production, trade and consumption of biofuels that the problems of weakening food security, environmental degradation and increasing greenhouse gases through land-use changes began to unfold. In other words, the difference between political aims for why biofuels are promoted and their consequences has grown – which is also recognized by the EU policy-makers. Therefore, the global networks of producing, trading and consuming biofuels may face a complete restructure if the European Commission accomplishes its pursuit to sideline crop-based biofuels after 2020. My aim with this dissertation is not only to trace the manifold evolutions of the instruments used by the Union to govern biofuels but also to reveal how this evolution has influenced the dynamics of biofuel development. Therefore, I study the ways the EU’s legal and political instruments of steering biofuels are coconstitutive with the globalized spaces of biofuel development. My analytical strategy can be outlined through three concepts. I use the term ‘assemblage’ to approach the operations of the loose entity of actors and non-human elements that are the constituents of multi-scalar and -sectorial biofuel development. ‘Topology’ refers to the spatiality of this European biofuel assemblage and its parts whose evolving relations are treated as the active constituents of space, instead of simply being located in space. I apply the concept of ‘nomosphere’ to characterize the framework of policies, laws and other instruments that the EU applies and construes while attempting to govern biofuels. Even though both the materials and methods vary in the independent articles, these three concepts characterize my analytical strategy that allows me to study law, policy and space associated with each other. The results of my examinations underscore the importance of the instruments of governance of the EU constituting and stabilizing the spaces of producing and, on the other hand, how topological ruptures in biofuel development have enforced the need to reform policies. This analysis maps the vast scope of actors that are influenced by the mechanism of EU biofuel governance and, what is more, shows how they are actively engaging in the Union’s institutional policy formulation. By examining the consequences of fast biofuel development that are spatially dislocated from the established spaces of producing, trading and consuming biofuels such as indirect land use changes, I unfold the processes not tackled by the instruments of the EU. Indeed, it is these spatially dislocated processes that have pushed the Commission construing a new type of governing biofuels: transferring the instruments of climate change mitigation to land-use policies. Although efficient in mitigating these dislocated consequences, these instruments have also created peculiar ontological scaffolding for governing biofuels. According to this mode of governance, the spatiality of biofuel development appears to be already determined and the agency that could dampen the negative consequences originating from land-use practices is treated as irrelevant.

The reconstruction of social meaning in the space of flows

Artikkeli on alunperin julkaistu teoksessa: The informational city (1989) / Manuel Castells

Effects of group size and space allocation on physiological, behavioural and production-related welfare parameters in farmed silver fox cubs

Selostus: Ryhmäkoon ja käytössä olevan tilan vaikutus tarhattujen hopeakettupentujen hyvinvointiin

Converter-flux-based current control of voltage source PWM rectifiers - analysis and implementation

Pulsewidth-modulated (PWM) rectifier technology is increasingly used in industrial applications like variable-speed motor drives, since it offers several desired features such as sinusoidal input currents, controllable power factor, bidirectional power flow and high quality DC output voltage. To achieve these features,however, an effective control system with fast and accurate current and DC voltage responses is required. From various control strategies proposed to meet these control objectives, in most cases the commonly known principle of the synchronous-frame current vector control along with some space-vector PWM scheme have been applied. Recently, however, new control approaches analogous to the well-established direct torque control (DTC) method for electrical machines have also emerged to implement a high-performance PWM rectifier. In this thesis the concepts of classical synchronous-frame current control and DTC-based PWM rectifier control are combined and a new converter-flux-based current control (CFCC) scheme is introduced. To achieve sufficient dynamic performance and to ensure a stable operation, the proposed control system is thoroughly analysed and simple rules for the controller design are suggested. Special attention is paid to the estimationof the converter flux, which is the key element of converter-flux-based control. Discrete-time implementation is also discussed. Line-voltage-sensorless reactive reactive power control methods for the L- and LCL-type line filters are presented. For the L-filter an open-loop control law for the d-axis current referenceis proposed. In the case of the LCL-filter the combined open-loop control and feedback control is proposed. The influence of the erroneous filter parameter estimates on the accuracy of the developed control schemes is also discussed. A newzero vector selection rule for suppressing the zero-sequence current in parallel-connected PWM rectifiers is proposed. With this method a truly standalone and independent control of the converter units is allowed and traditional transformer isolation and synchronised-control-based solutions are avoided. The implementation requires only one additional current sensor. The proposed schemes are evaluated by the simulations and laboratory experiments. A satisfactory performance and good agreement between the theory and practice are demonstrated.