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This market research paper has been prepared under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Veit of TH Köln and Prof. Dr. Carol Scovotti of University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in the course of the inter-university cross-border collaboration student research project “Export Opportunity Surveys (EOS)”. This study explores organic lipstick export opportunities to the German and US markets.
Water shortage and a rising water demand are prevalent issues on the political agenda worldwide. Available water resources must not only be provided to ensure a domestic and drinking water supply for a steadily increasing population but also for the growing industrial and agricultural sectors. This work outlines how the use of the innovative vacuum multi‐effect membrane distillation contributes to improve the water management efficiency in the following key industry sectors: desalination, drinking water and beverage industry, pharmaceutical, agro and chemical as well as oil and gas industry.
Resilience in relation to flood risk management (FRM) is not a new concept, yet parts of the FRM community are still struggling to apply it. The main challenge this study addresses is the question as to whether parts of the FRM community should still adopt, or rather “leap‐frog,” resilience. The main purpose is to evaluate whether resilience is a still on‐going trend or, already subsiding. Research suggests that resilience is an on‐going trend that connects research and policy and has gained international recognition as expressed by international guidelines and bodies promoting its research but also its operationalization. Academic literature in the area of FRM also shows a significant continuing development. Resilience enables to analyze dynamics and transformations of riverine areas, or coastal zones in connection to an integrated social‐environmental system approach with more emphasis and conceptual basis than previous concepts. Resilience is more than a short‐lived notion and it appears that FRM researchers cannot avoid addressing it. Resilience often is a convergence of ideas and mainstreaming of efforts, which in many venues is absolutely necessary and can help, for example, to decrease silo‐thinking. But as academics, we have a mandate to remain skeptical and remain on the look‐out for novel ideas, too.
This article is categorized under:
Engineering Water > Planning Water
The quantification of greenhouse gas emissions from aquatic ecosystems requires knowledge about the spatial and temporal dynamics of free gas in sediments. Freezing the sediment in situ offers a promising method for obtaining gas‐bearing sediment samples, unaffected by changes in hydrostatic pressure and sample temperature during core withdrawal and subsequent analysis. This article presents a novel freeze coring technique to preserve the in situ stratigraphy and gas bubble characteristics. Nondestructive X‐ray computed tomography (CT) scans were used to identify and characterize coring disturbances of gravity and freeze cores associated with gassy sediment, as well as the effect of the freezing process on the gas bubble characteristics. Real‐time X‐ray CT scans were conducted to visualize the progression of the freezing process. Additional experiments were conducted to determine the freezing rate to assess the probability of sediment particle/bubble migration, and gas bubble nucleation at the phase transition of pore water to ice. The performance of the freeze coring technique was evaluated under field conditions in Olsberg and Urft Reservoir (Germany). The results demonstrate the capability of the freeze coring technique for the preservation of gas‐bearing sediments and the analysis of gas bubble distribution pattern in both reservoirs. Nevertheless, the obtained cores showed that nearly all gravity and freeze cores show some degree of coring disturbances.
Anaerobic digestion plants have the potential to produce biogas on demand to help balance renewable energy production and energy demand by consumers. A proportional integral (PI) controller is constructed and tuned with a novel tuning method to control biogas production in an optimal manner. In this approach, the proportional part of the controller is a function of the feeding rate and system's degree of stability. To estimate the degree of stability, a simulation‐based soft sensor is developed. By means of the PI controller, the requirement for gas storage capacity of the digester is reduced by approximately 30 % compared to a constant, continuous feeding regime of the digester.
Grasping and manipulation with anthropomorphic robotic and prosthetic hands presents a scientific challenge regarding mechanical design, sensor system, and control. Apart from the mechanical design of such hands, embedding sensors needed for closed-loop control of grasping tasks remains a hard problem due to limited space and required high level of integration of different components. In this paper we present a scalable design model of artificial fingers, which combines mechanical design and embedded electronics with a sophisticated multi-modal sensor system consisting of sensors for sensing normal and shear force, distance, acceleration, temperature, and joint angles. The design is fully parametric, allowing automated scaling of the fingers to arbitrary dimensions in the human hand spectrum. To this end, the electronic parts are composed of interchangeable modules that facilitate the echanical scaling of the fingers and are fully enclosed by the mechanical parts of the finger. The resulting design model allows deriving freely scalable and multimodally sensorised fingers for robotic and prosthetic hands. Four physical demonstrators are assembled and tested to evaluate the approach.
Ecosystems provide a wide range of goods, services or ecosystem services (ES) to society. Estimating the impact of land use and land cover (LULC) changes on ES values (ESV) is an important tool to support decision making. This study used remote sensing and GIS tools to analyze LULC change and transitions from 2001 to 2016 and assess its impact on ESV in a tropical forested landscape in the southern plains of Nepal. The total ESV of the landscape for the year 2016 is estimated at USD 1264 million year−1. As forests are the dominant land cover class and have high ES value per hectare, they have the highest contribution in total ESV. However, as a result of LULC change (loss of forests, water bodies, and agricultural land), the total ESV of the landscape has declined by USD 11 million year−1. Major reductions come from the loss in values of climate regulation, water supply, provision of raw materials and food production. To halt the ongoing loss of ES and maintain the supply and balance of different ES in the landscape, it is important to properly monitor, manage and utilize ecosystems. We believe this study will inform policymakers, environmental managers, and the general public on the ongoing changes and contribute to developing effective land use policy in the region.
Metallic tubular micro-components play an important role in a broad range of products,
from industrial microsystem technology, such as medical engineering, electronics and optoelectronics, to sensor technology or microfluidics. The demand for such components is increasing, and forming processes can present a number of advantages for industrial manufacturing. These include, for example, a high productivity, enhanced shaping possibilities, applicability of a wide spectrum of materials and the possibility to produce parts with a high stiffness and strength. However, certain difficulties arise as a result of scaling down conventional tube forming processes to the microscale. These include not only the influence of the known size effects on material and friction behavior, but also constraints in the feasible miniaturization of forming tools. Extensive research work has been conducted over the past few years on micro-tube forming techniques, which deal with the development of novel and optimized processes, to counteract these restrictions. This paper reviews the relevant advances in micro-tube fabrication and shaping. A particular focus is enhancement in forming possibilities, accuracy and obtained component characteristics, presented in the reviewed research work. Furthermore, achievements in severe plastic deformation for micro-tube generation and in micro-tube testing methods are discussed.
Sensors can monitor physical attributes and record multimodal data in order to provide feedback. The application calligraphy trainer, exploits these affordances in the context of handwriting learning. It records the expert’s handwriting performance to compute an expert model. The application then uses the expert model to provide guidance and feedback to the learners.
However, new learners can be overwhelmed by the feedback as handwriting learning is a tedious task. This paper presents the pilot study done with the calligraphy trainer to evaluate the mental effort induced by various types of feedback provided by the application. Ten participants, five in the control group and five in the treatment group, who were Ph.D. students in the technology-enhanced learning domain, took part in the study. The participants used the application to learn three characters from the Devanagari script. The results show higher mental effort in the treatment group when all types of feedback are provided simultaneously. The mental efforts for individual feedback were similar to the control group. In conclusion, the feedback provided by the calligraphy trainer does not impose high mental effort and, therefore, the design considerations of the calligraphy trainer can be insightful for multimodal feedback designers.
Multidrug resistance (MDR) in tumors and pathogens remains a major problem in the efficacious treatment of patients by reduction of therapy options and subsequent treatment failure. Various mechanisms are described to be involved in the development of MDR with overexpression of ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters reflecting the most extensively studied. These membrane transporters translocate a wide variety of substrates utilizing energy from ATP hydrolysis leading to decreased intracellular drug accumulation and impaired drug efficacy. One treatment strategy might be inhibition of transporter-mediated efflux by small molecules. Isocoumarins and 3,4-dihydroisocoumarins are a large group of natural products derived from various sources with great structural and functional variety, but have so far not been in the focus as potential MDR reversing agents. Thus, three natural products and nine novel 3,4-dihydroisocoumarins were designed and analyzed regarding cytotoxicity induction and inhibition of human ABC transporters P-glycoprotein (P-gp), multidrug resistance-associated protein 1 (MRP1) and breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP) in a variety of human cancer cell lines as well as the yeast ABC transporter Pdr5 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Dual inhibitors of P-gp and BCRP and inhibitors of Pdr5 were identified, and distinct structure-activity relationships for transporter inhibition were revealed. The strongest inhibitor of P-gp and BCRP, which inhibited the transporters up to 80 to 90% compared to the respective positive controls, demonstrated the ability to reverse chemotherapy resistance in resistant cancer cell lines up to 5.6-fold. In the case of Pdr5, inhibitors were identified that prevented substrate transport and/or ATPase activity with IC50 values in the low micromolar range. However, cell toxicity was not observed. Molecular docking of the test compounds to P-gp revealed that differences in inhibition capacity were based on different binding affinities to the transporter. Thus, these small molecules provide novel lead structures for further optimization.