Analyse des tendances des séries temporelles de la concentration en azote minéral dissous dans les trois principaux estuaires de la façade Manche-Atlantique

Estuaries are areas which, from their structure, their fonctioning, and their localisation, are subject to significant contribution of nutrients. One of the objectif of the RNO, the French network for coastal water quality monitoring, is to assess the levels and trends of nutrient concentrations in estuaries. A linear model was used in order to describe and to explain the total dissolved nitrogen concentration evolution in the three most important estuaries on the Chanel-Atlantic front (Seine, Loire and Gironde). As a first step, the selection of a reliable data set was performed. Then total dissolved nitrogen evolution schemes in estuary environment were graphically studied, and allowed a resonable choice of covariables. The salinity played a major role in explaining nitrogen concentration variability in estuary, and dilution lines were proved to be a useful tool to detect outlying observations and to model the nitrogenlsalinity relation. Increasing trends were detected by the model, with a high magnitude in Seine, intermediate in Loire, and lower in Gironde. The non linear trend estimated in Loire and Seine estuaries could be due to important interannual variations as suggest in graphics. In the objective of the QUADRIGE database valorisation, a discussion on the statistical model, and on the RNO hydrological data sampling strategy, allowed to formulate suggestions towards a better exploitation of nutrient data.

PREPARATION OF POLYELECTROLYTE MEMBRANES EMBEDDED WITH ZEOLITE NANOPARTICLES FOR ENHANCED PERFORMANCE IN FORWARD OSMOSIS

Water scarcity is a global issue that has already affected every continent. Membrane technology is considered as one of the most promising candidates for resolving this worsening issue. Among all the membrane processes, the emerging forward osmosis (FO) membrane process is osmotically-driven and has unique advantages compared with other traditional pressure-driven membrane processes. One of the major challenges to advancing the FO membrane process is the lack of a suitable membrane. Polyelectrolyte thin film prepared via layer-by-layer (LbL) technique has demonstrated its excellent performance in many applications including electronics, optics, sensors, etc. Recent studies have revealed the potential of polyelectrolyte thin films in acting as the active separation layer of FO membranes, but significant efforts are still needed to improve the membrane performance and understand the transport mechanisms. This dissertation introduces a novel approach to prepare a zeolite-embedded polyelectrolyte composite membrane for enhanced FO performance. This membrane takes advantages of the versatile LbL process to unprecedentedly incorporate high loading of zeolite nanoparticles, which are anticipated to facilitate water transport due to the uniquely interconnected structure of zeolites. Major topics discussed in this dissertation include: (1) the synthesis and evaluation of the polyelectrolyte-zeolite composite FO membrane, (2) the examination of the fouling resistance to identify its technical limitations, (3) the demonstration of the membrane regenerability as an effective strategy for membrane fouling control, and (4) the investigation of crosslinking effects on the membrane performance to elucidate the transport mechanisms involved in the zeolite-embedded polyelectrolyte membranes. Comparative studies have been made between polyelectrolyte membranes with and without zeolite incorporation. The findings suggest that the zeolite-embedded membrane, although slightly more susceptible to silica scaling, has demonstrated enhanced water flux and separation capability, good resistance to organic fouling, and complete regenerability for fouling control. Additionally, the embedded zeolite nanoparticles are proved to be able to create fast pathways for water transport. Overall, this work provides a novel strategy to create zeolite-polymer composite membranes with enhanced separation performance and unique fouling mitigation properties.

Integrated micro fuel cells with on-board hydride reactors and autonomous control schemes

Miniaturization of power generators to the MEMS scale, based on the hydrogen-air fuel cell, is the object of this research. The micro fuel cell approach has been adopted for advantages of both high power and energy densities. On-board hydrogen production/storage and an efficient control scheme that facilitates integration with a fuel cell membrane electrode assembly (MEA) are key elements for micro energy conversion. Millimeter-scale reactors (ca. 10 µL) have been developed, for hydrogen production through hydrolysis of CaH2 and LiAlH4, to yield volumetric energy densities of the order of 200 Whr/L. Passive microfluidic control schemes have been implemented in order to facilitate delivery, self-regulation, and at the same time eliminate bulky auxiliaries that run on parasitic power. One technique uses surface tension to pump water in a microchannel for hydrolysis and is self-regulated, based on load, by back pressure from accumulated hydrogen acting on a gas-liquid microvalve. This control scheme improves uniformity of power delivery during long periods of lower power demand, with fast switching to mass transport regime on the order of seconds, thus providing peak power density of up to 391.85 W/L. Another method takes advantage of water recovery by backward transport through the MEA, of water vapor that is generated at the cathode half-cell reaction. This regulation-free scheme increases available reactor volume to yield energy density of 313 Whr/L, and provides peak power density of 104 W/L. Prototype devices have been tested for a range of duty periods from 2-24 hours, with multiple switching of power demand in order to establish operation across multiple regimes. Issues identified as critical to the realization of the integrated power MEMS include effects of water transport and byproduct hydrate swelling on hydrogen production in the micro reactor, and ambient relative humidity on fuel cell performance.

Hydric behavior of earth materials and the effects of their stabilization with cement or lime: study on repair mortars for historical rammed earth structures

Earthen building materials bear interesting environmental advantages and are the most appropriate to conserve historical earth constructions. To improve mechanical properties, these materials are often stabilized with cement or lime, but the impact of the stabilizers on the water transport properties, which are also critical, has been very rarely evaluated. We have tested four earth-based repair mortars applied on three distinct and representative rammed earth surfaces. Three mortars are based on earth collected from rammed earth buildings in south of Portugal and the fourth mortar is based on a commercial clayish earth. The main objective of the work was over the commercial earth mortar, applied stabilized and not stabilized on the three rammed earth surfaces to repair, to assess the influence of the stabilizers. The other three earth mortars (not stabilized) were applied on each type of rammed earth, representing the repair only made with local materials. The four unstabilized earth materials depicted nonlinear dependence on t1/2 during capillary suction. This behaviour was probably due to clay swelling. Stabilization with any of the four tested binders enabled the linear dependence of t1/2 expected from Washburn's equation, probably because the swelling did not take place in this case. However, the stabilizers also increased significantly the capillary suction and the capillary porosity of the materials. This means that, in addition to increasing the carbon footprint, stabilizers like cement and lime have functional disadvantages that discourage its use in repair mortars for raw earth construction.

Mise en oeuvre de la surveillance pour la Directive Cadre Européenne sur l’Eau dans les départements d’Outre-Mer - Volet littoral

The implementation of the WFD in the French overseas takes into account local, morphological, climatic and socioeconomic peculiarities, as well as specificities of their ecosystems. This document provide an up-to-date assessment of the state of characteristics of the coastal water bodies, of development of indicators and of WFD monitoring programs in each of the French overseas departments: Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Reunion Island and Mayotte.

Dinâmica dos nutrientes na Ria Formosa: efeitos da interacçäo da laguna com as suas interfaces na reciclagem do azoto, fósforo e sílica

Tese de dout. em Ciências do Mar, Instituto de Investigação das Pescas e do Mar, Univ. do Algarve, 1996

Mediterranean outflow and its link with upstream conditions in Alboran Sea

The Western Alboran Gyre (WAG) at the eastern entrance of the Strait of Gibraltar can influence the Mediterranean outflow (MOW) by favoring or hampering the flow of Levantine and Western Mediterranean (LIW and WMDW) waters, the main constituents of the MOW. Observations collected at Camarinal sill in the Strait and AVISO data are used to investigate this issue.

Durability in concrete : new instruments : new opportunities

New infrastructure, particularly in the developing countries, demands substantial capital investment and a loss of durability of the concrete means a waste of oportunity. Improving durability of concrete structures is a non-trivial task. The durability of concrete has been related to its ability to resist the transport of water and the potentail imporvements to concrete durability using supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) has been well documented. With access to neutron and synchrotron facilities it has become possible to; (a) measure the ability of SCM to inhibit transport of water in concrete (b) measure particle size increase of hydrating cements (with and without SCM) by ultra-small angle neutron scattering (c) use neutron tomography combined with x-ray tomography to determine the three dimensional flaws in the structure of concretes that enable water ingress into structures, and (d) determine the amount of curing or degree of hydration on the durability of SCM/OPC blends. This review will detail preliminary results on cement and concrete obtained using the newly available neutron, synchrotron and other facilities in Australia and Brazil and highlights their ability to estimate factors which determine the service life of concrete

Monitoreo biológico poblacional de Aulacomya atra (Molina, 1782) en el litoral de Moquegua y Tacna

La pesquería del recurso choro (Aulacomya atra) en los últimos años presenta mayor interés en los puertos de Ilo (Moquegua) y Morro Sama (Tacna), incrementándose notoriamente sus desembarques, mejorando los beneficios económicos de los extractores. Sin embargo, hay consecuencias negativas en los bancos naturales, al observarse disminución de la talla media y de las poblaciones en algunas zonas de extracción. Los desembarques en el 2014 alcanzaron 1556 t en Moquegua y Tacna, registrándose 15% de incremento en relación al 2013. Las principales zonas de extracción fueron Leonas y Cuartel (Ilo) que presentan mayores densidades por presencia de individuos juveniles, mientras que las densidades de adultos disminuyen progresivamente. En la Región Tacna destacan las zonas de Lozas y Lobera en los desembarques, con mayores densidades en Lobera y Quebrada de Burros, las zonas de Pocoma, Escoria y Mesas presentaron las menores densidades. El comportamiento reproductivo del recurso indica la existencia de dos periodos importantes de maduración y desove por año, siendo el más importante el de primavera. La composición especiológica de las matrices de A. atra estuvo conformada por 91 especies variando su frecuencia de ocurrencia por zona de extracción y periodo de muestreo, lo que indica la importancia de esta comunidad como organismo bioingeniero. El índice de diversidad de Shannon varió entre 2,6 a 4,8 bits/ind. Las condiciones oceanográficas no muestran fuerte presencia en toda el área evaluada de las Aguas Costeras Frías durante los monitoreos de abril, junio y agosto.

Determination of coastal ground and surface water processes and character by use of hydrochemistry and stable isotopes, Fraser Coast, Queensland

This study was part of an integrated project developed in response to concerns regarding current and future land practices affecting water quality within coastal catchments and adjacent marine environments. Two forested coastal catchments on the Fraser Coast, Australia, were chosen as examples of low-modification areas with similar geomorphological and land-use characteristics to many other coastal zones in southeast Queensland. For this component of the overall project, organic , physico-chemical (Eh, pH and DO), ionic (Fe2+, Fe3+), and isotopic (ä13CDIC, ä15NDIN ä34SSO4) data were used to characterise waters and identify sources and processes contributing to concentrations and form of dissolved Fe, C, N and S within the ground and surface waters of these coastal catchments. Three sites with elevated Fe concentrations are discussed in detail. These included a shallow pool with intermittent interaction with the surface water drainage system, a monitoring well within a semi-confined alluvial aquifer, and a monitoring well within the fresh/saline water mixing zone adjacent to an estuary. Conceptual models of processes occurring in these environments are presented. The primary factors influencing Fe transport were; microbial reduction of Fe3+ oxyhydroxides in groundwaters and in the hyporheic zone of surface drainage systems, organic input available for microbial reduction and Fe3+ complexation, bacterial activity for reduction and oxidation, iron curtain effects where saline/fresh water mixing occurs, and variation in redox conditions with depth in ground and surface water columns. Data indicated that groundwater seepage appears a more likely source of Fe to coastal waters (during periods of low rainfall) via tidal flux. The drainage system is ephemeral and contributes little discharge to marine waters. However, data collected during a high rainfall event indicated considerable Fe loads can be transported to the estuary mouth from the catchment.

Modelling sea water intrusion in coastal aquifers using heterogeneous computing

The objective of this PhD research program is to investigate numerical methods for simulating variably-saturated flow and sea water intrusion in coastal aquifers in a high-performance computing environment. The work is divided into three overlapping tasks: to develop an accurate and stable finite volume discretisation and numerical solution strategy for the variably-saturated flow and salt transport equations; to implement the chosen approach in a high performance computing environment that may have multiple GPUs or CPU cores; and to verify and test the implementation. The geological description of aquifers is often complex, with porous materials possessing highly variable properties, that are best described using unstructured meshes. The finite volume method is a popular method for the solution of the conservation laws that describe sea water intrusion, and is well-suited to unstructured meshes. In this work we apply a control volume-finite element (CV-FE) method to an extension of a recently proposed formulation (Kees and Miller, 2002) for variably saturated groundwater flow. The CV-FE method evaluates fluxes at points where material properties and gradients in pressure and concentration are consistently defined, making it both suitable for heterogeneous media and mass conservative. Using the method of lines, the CV-FE discretisation gives a set of differential algebraic equations (DAEs) amenable to solution using higher-order implicit solvers. Heterogeneous computer systems that use a combination of computational hardware such as CPUs and GPUs, are attractive for scientific computing due to the potential advantages offered by GPUs for accelerating data-parallel operations. We present a C++ library that implements data-parallel methods on both CPU and GPUs. The finite volume discretisation is expressed in terms of these data-parallel operations, which gives an efficient implementation of the nonlinear residual function. This makes the implicit solution of the DAE system possible on the GPU, because the inexact Newton-Krylov method used by the implicit time stepping scheme can approximate the action of a matrix on a vector using residual evaluations. We also propose preconditioning strategies that are amenable to GPU implementation, so that all computationally-intensive aspects of the implicit time stepping scheme are implemented on the GPU. Results are presented that demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed numeric methods and formulation. The formulation offers excellent conservation of mass, and higher-order temporal integration increases both numeric efficiency and accuracy of the solutions. Flux limiting produces accurate, oscillation-free solutions on coarse meshes, where much finer meshes are required to obtain solutions with equivalent accuracy using upstream weighting. The computational efficiency of the software is investigated using CPUs and GPUs on a high-performance workstation. The GPU version offers considerable speedup over the CPU version, with one GPU giving speedup factor of 3 over the eight-core CPU implementation.

Concerning the current conditions and transport of sand in the shallow water areas off the coast of the south-eastern North Sea [Translation from: Hamburger Kustenforschung 29 [pages 41-43 only], 1974]

With the aid of the German Research Association in the central programme 'Sand movements in the German coastal region', an investigation into the current conditions in the shallow water areas of the coasts of the south-eastern North Sea between Sylt and the Weser estuary was carried out by the author. Foundations of the work are 19 continuous current recordings in five profiles normal to the coast from years 1971 to 1973. Off the coasts of the south-eastern North Sea varying tidal currents impinge; they are currents whose directions may vary periodically through all points of the compass. They are caused by the circulating tides in the North Sea (Amphidromien). The turning flow movement experiences a deformation in the very shallow coastal waters, and as it happens the flow turning movement in the case of high tide continues right up onto the outer flats, while here and in the fore-lying shallow water areas around the time of low water (on account of the small depths of waters), there prevails a more variable current. A result of this hydrodynamical procedure is the development of counter currents. This partial translation of the original paper provides the summary of this study of of the mudflat areas between the Elbe and Weser.

An idealized rural coastal zone management integrating land and water use

Various countries have formulated special integrated coastal zone management (ICZM) strategies which seek to both manage development and conserve natural resources and integrate and coordinate the relevant people sectors and their functions and roles within the bounds of this rich realm. Concerns that may be addressed by ICZM include: 1) Natural resources degradation; 2) Pollution; 3) Land use conflicts; and, 4) Destruction of life and property by natural hazards. Some prevalent sources of environmental impacts (livelihoods) are listed, together with some recommendations to the concerns which they may raise in relation to coastal zone management: agriculture; aquaculture; fisheries; forestry; human settlements; tourism; and, transport industry.