Geomicrobiology of meromictic, metal-mine pit lakes in the Iberian Pyrite Belt and biotechnological applications

220 p.

Mine-waste pollution of Bear Butte Creek, Black Hills, South Dakota

Effluents leaving the Gilt Edge Mining properties in the Black Hills near Deadwood, South Dakota, were collected during April 1940. Field studies of these effluents and of the streams receiving them were made at the time and subsequently laboratory assays and analyses have been completed. ... Data from this particular case of mine waste pollution are presented here.

Displacement and mixing ventilation driven by opposing wind and buoyancy

The effect of an opposing wind on the stratification and flow produced by a buoyant plume rising from a heat source on the floor of a ventilated enclosure is investigated. Ventilation openings located at high level on the windward side of the enclosure and at low level on the leeward side allow a wind-driven flow from high to low level, opposite to the buoyancy-driven flow. One of two stable steady flow regimes is established depending on a dimensionless parameter F that characterizes the relative magnitudes of the wind-driven and buoyancy-driven velocities within the enclosure, and on the time history of the flow. A third, unstable steady flow solution is identified. For small opposing winds (small F) a steady, two-layer stratification and displacement ventilation is established. Exterior fluid enters through the lower leeward openings and buoyant interior fluid leaves through the upper windward openings. As the wind speed increases, the opposing wind may cause a reversal in the flow direction. In this case, cool exterior fluid enters through the high windward openings and mixes the interior fluid, which exits through the leeward openings. There are now two possibilities. If the rate of heat input by the source exceeds the rate of heat loss through the leeward openings, the temperature of the interior increases and this flow reversal is only maintained temporarily. The buoyancy force increases with time, the flow reverts to its original direction, and steady two-layer displacement ventilation is re-established and maintained. In this regime, the increase in wind speed increases the depth and temperature of the warm upper layer, and reduces the ventilation flow rate. If, on the other hand, the heat loss exceeds the heat input, the interior cools and the buoyancy-driven flow decreases. The reversed flow is maintained, the stratification is destroyed and mixing ventilation occurs. Further increases in wind speed increase the ventilation rate and decrease the interior temperature. The transitions between the two ventilation flow patterns exhibit hysteresis. The change from displacement ventilation to mixing ventilation occurs at a higher F than the transition from mixing to displacement. Further, we find that the transition from mixing to displacement ventilation occurs at a fixed value of F, whereas the transition from displacement to mixing flow is dependent on the details of the time history of the flow and the geometry of the openings, and is not determined solely by the value of F. Theoretical models that predic t the steady stratification profiles and flow rates for the displacement and mixing ventilation, and the transitions between them, are presented and compared with measurements from laboratory experiments. The transition between these ventilation patterns completely changes the internal environment, and we discuss some of the implications for the natural ventilation of buildings. © 2004 Cambridge University Press.

Fractal dimension, wavelet shrinkage and anomaly detection for mine hunting

An anomaly detection approach is considered for the mine hunting in sonar imagery problem. The authors exploit previous work that used dual-tree wavelets and fractal dimension to adaptively suppress sand ripples and a matched filter as an initial detector. Here, lacunarity inspired features are extracted from the remaining false positives, again using dual-tree wavelets. A one-class support vector machine is then used to learn a decision boundary, based only on these false positives. The approach exploits the large quantities of 'normal' natural background data available but avoids the difficult requirement of collecting examples of targets in order to train a classifier. © 2012 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Urban canyon influence on building natural ventilation

The natural ventilation of a building, flanked by others forming urban canyons and driven by the combined forces of wind and thermal buoyancy, has been studied experimentally at small scale. The aim was to improve our understanding of the effect of the urban canyon geometry on passive building ventilation. The steady ventilation of an isolated building was observed to change dramatically, both in terms of the thermal stratification and airflow rate, when placed within the confines of urban canyons. The ventilation flows and internal stratifications observed at small scale are presented for a range of canyon widths (building densities) and wind speeds. Two typical opening arrangements are considered. Flanking an otherwise isolated building with others of similar geometry as in a typical urban canyon was shown to reverse the effect of wind on the thermally-driven ventilation. As a consequence, neglecting the surrounding geometry when designing naturally-ventilated buildings may result in poor ventilation. Further implications are discussed.

Ventilation effectiveness measures based on heat removal: Part 2. Application to natural ventilation flows

The three effectiveness measures based on the ability of a flow to flush buoyancy from a ventilated space proposed by Coffey and Hunt [Ventilation effectiveness measures based on heat removal-part 1. Definitions. Building and Environment, in press, doi:10.1016/j.buildenv.2006.03.016.] are applied to assess and compare two fundamental natural ventilation flows. We focus on the limiting cases of passive displacement and passive mixing ventilation flows during transient conditions. These transient flows occur when, for example, heat is purged from a building at night. Whilst it is widely recognised that mixing flows are less efficient at purging heat than displacement flows, our results indicate that, when a particular zone of a room is considered, displacement ventilation can result in lower effectiveness than mixing ventilation. When a room is considered as a whole, displacement ventilation yields higher effectiveness than mixing ventilation and we quantify these differences in terms of the geometry of the space and opening area. The proposed theoretical predictions are compared with effectiveness deduced from measurements made during laboratory experiments and show good agreement. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Ventilation effectiveness measures based on heat removal: Part 1. Definitions

The effectiveness of ventilation flows is considered from the perspective of buoyancy (or heat) removal from a space. This perspective is distinct from the standard in which the effectiveness is based on the concentrations of a neutrally buoyant contaminant/passive tracer. Three new measures of effectiveness are proposed based on the ability of a flow to flush buoyancy from a ventilated space. These measures provide estimates of instantaneous and time-averaged effectiveness for the entire space, and local effectiveness at any height of interest. From a generalisation of the latter, a vertical profile of effectiveness is defined. These measures enable quantitative comparisons to be made between different flows and they are applicable when there is a difference in density (as is typical due to temperature differences) between the interior environment and the replacement air. Applications, therefore, include natural ventilation, hybrid ventilation and a range of forced ventilation flows. Finally, we demonstrate how the ventilation effectiveness of a room may be assessed from simple traces of temperature versus time. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Heat source modelling and natural ventilation efficiency

We compare natural ventilation flows established by a range of heat source distributions at floor level. Both evenly distributed and highly localised line and point source distributions are considered. We demonstrate that modelling the ventilation flow driven by a uniformly distributed heat source is equivalent to the flow driven by a large number of localised sources. A model is developed for the transient flow development in a room with a uniform heat distribution and is compared with existing models for localised buoyancy inputs. For large vent areas the flow driven by localised heat sources reaches a steady state more rapidly than the uniformly distributed case. For small vent areas there is little difference in the transient development times. Our transient model is then extended to consider the time taken to flush a neutrally buoyant pollutant from a naturally ventilated room. Again comparisons are drawn between uniform and localised (point and line) heat source geometries. It is demonstrated that for large vent areas a uniform heat distribution provides the fastest flushing. However, for smaller vent areas, localised heat sources produce the fastest flushing. These results are used to suggest a definition for the term 'natural ventilation efficiency', and a model is developed to estimate this efficiency as a function of the room and heat source geometries. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.