This book comprehensively reviews biomass and bioeconomy, biomass production and treatment, biomass utilization, biomass biorefineries, and bioenergy generation from biomass. It discusses topics ...focusing on the concept of circular and sustainable bioeconomy, economic assessment of biomass utilization, biomass valorization, biomass pretreatment, bioprocessing of biomass using integrated bioindustrial systems, and production of value-added biochemicals and bioenergy from biomass.
Human activity recognition (HAR) is essential for the development of robots to assist humans in daily activities. HAR is required to be accurate, fast and suitable for low-cost wearable devices to ...ensure portable and safe assistance. Current computational methods can achieve accurate recognition results but tend to be computationally expensive, making them unsuitable for the development of wearable robots in terms of speed and processing power. This paper proposes a light-weight architecture for recognition of activities using five inertial measurement units and four goniometers attached to the lower limb. First, a systematic extraction of time-domain features from wearable sensor data is performed. Second, a small high-speed artificial neural network and line search method for cost function optimization are used for activity recognition. The proposed method is systematically validated using a large dataset composed of wearable sensor data from seven activities (
) associated with eight healthy subjects. The accuracy and speed results are compared against methods commonly used for activity recognition including deep neural networks, convolutional neural networks, long short-term memory and convolutional-long short-term memory hybrid networks. The experiments demonstrate that the light-weight architecture can achieve a high recognition accuracy of 98.60%, 93.10% and 84.77% for seen data from seen subjects, unseen data from seen subjects and unseen data from unseen subjects, respectively, and an inference time of 85 μs. The results show that the proposed approach can perform accurate and fast activity recognition with a reduced computational complexity suitable for the development of portable assistive devices.
Biomass energy, especially biogas production, is a renewable and sustainable form of energy. Biogas is becoming more important due to its environmentally-sound and energy-saving production ...technologies. The state-of-the-art focuses on the biostimulation of methanogens using nanomaterials which is a hot topic. Therefore, the objectives of this literature review are to introduce and define the uptake mechanism of nanoparticles (NPs) by methanogenic bacteria, review the enhancement of biogas and methane production using chemical additives such as trace elements and nanomaterials, discuss the biostimulating effects nanoparticles, review the anaerobic digestion of biomass, investigate the recommended concentrations of trace elements and nanoparticles in anaerobic digesters, present the role of some essential trace elements in various enzymes involved in anaerobic digestion, study the free metal mass transport and the metal adsorption to the microorganism surface as well as the metal transport into the microorganism and its biological response. It was found that the nanoparticles (NPs) biostimulate the bacterial cells which results in tremendously enhancing the bacterial activity and the kinetics of bacterial growth and cell division.
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•Ag-doped nanofibers was prepared by calcination of electrospun mats composed of titanium isopropoxide, silver nitrate and poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) in air atmosphere at ...700 °C.•Compared to nanoparticles of the same composition, the nanofibrous morphology enhanced the photocatalytic activity.•The localized surface plasmon characteristic of the silver nanoparticles modifies the catalytic activity of the Ag-doped nanofibers for water splitting reaction under the visible light irradiation.•The study opens a new avenue for enhancing the photcatalytic activity of the TiO2 nanostructures under visible light irradiation.
The decoration of titanium oxide nanostructures with noble metal forming nanoparticles and a nanofibrous morphology can result in overcoming the electron-hole fast recombination problem and enhancing the activity of this important photocatalyst under the visible light irradiation spectra.
In this study, Ag-decorated TiO2, with different Ag contents, was synthesized in nanoparticulate and nanofibrous forms. Synthesis of Ag-decorated nanofibers was performed by calcination of titanium isopropoxide/silver nitrate/polyvinylpyrrolidone electrospun nanofiber mats at 700 °C.
To prepare the nanoparticles, the initial electrospun sol–gel was dried, crushed and finely ground before the calcination process. As a photocatalyst for the water photosplitting process under visible light irradiation, the rate of hydrogen production was strongly affected by nanomorphology, Ag content, and reaction temperature. Typically, due to electron confinement in the 0D nanostructure, the nanofibrous morphology markedly enhanced the hydrogen evolution rate, by almost 8-fold compared with the nanoparticles. The hydrogen production rates for the samples containing 1 wt% Ag were 5.5 and 120 mmol H2/gcat for the nanoparticles and nanofibers, respectively.
For both formulations, increasing the silver content led to enhancement of the hydrogen production rate; however, the influence was clearer in the case of the nanoparticles. Investigation of the photocatalysis mechanism indicated that the localized surface plasmon of the silver nanoparticles was the main parameter resulting in the observed high photocatalytic activity under visible light irradiation.
Compared to the huge effort done by researchers in this field, this study draws attention to the strong influence of nanofibrous morphology in enhancing photocatalytic activity compared to nanoparticulates and the negative influence of reaction temperature on the proposed photocatalyst reactivity. Industrially, obtaining high yield at low temperature is an economic target.
Several studies indicated the association between benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) with osteoporosis and vitamin D deficiency implying that abnormal calcium metabolism may underlie BPPV. ...The aim of the present study is to confirm the correlation between BPPV and both decrease in bone mineral density (BMD) and vitamin D deficiency. The study group included 80 patients with idiopathic BPPV (52 females, 28 males), with age range 31–71 years (47.6 ± 9.1). The patients were divided into two groups; recurrent BPPV group including 36 subjects and non-recurrent group including 44 subjects. The control group included 100 healthy volunteers with age and gender distribution similar to the study group. All the subjects in the study were examined using Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry to assess BMD, and serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D for vitamin D assessment. The accepted normal levels were T-score > −1, and 25-hydroxyvitamin D > 30 ng/ml. Twenty-six (26 %) subjects showed abnormal T-score in the control group; 26 (59 %) in the non-recurrent BPPV and 22 (61 %) in the recurrent BPPV group. Chi square test showed significant difference between the control group and both BPPV groups. The control group had significantly higher 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels than the BPPV subgroups (
p
< 0.05). Moreover, the 25-hydroxyvitamin D was significantly lower in the recurrent BPPV than it was in the non-recurrent subgroup (
p
< 0.05). The results of the current study associate between reduced BMD and development/recurrence of BPPV. Moreover, low levels of vitamin D were related to development of BPPV while very low levels were associated with recurrence of BPPV. The co-occurrence of two morbidities is not by itself supportive of a relationship, but the cumulating studies correlating between BPPV and both vitamin D deficiency and low BMD indicate the investigation and treatment of those disorders in cases with recurrent BPPV.
Summary
Biogas generation from the latent energy in biomass is one of the most attractive renewable energy sources. This can be attributed to the environmental friendly nature of the process and its ...less energy requirements. This article reviews the anaerobic digestion of biomass (livestock manure and crop residues) for biogas and methane production as a source of renewable energy. Furthermore, this study investigates the enhancement of biogas and methane production using light and laser radiations. The laser radiation accelerates bacterial division and growth, where this process is termed as “photobiostimulation.” Additionally, laser radiation photoactivates the inactive enzymes. The results of this literature review showed that the irradiation of methanogenic bacteria with laser sources increased the biogas production by one and a half fold the traditional method of biogas production. The simultaneous irradiation of both nanomaterials and methanogenic bacteria using laser radiation increased the biogas volume by twofolds the biogas volume resulted from the traditional method of biogas production.
Laser irradiation system that photobiostimulates methanogenic bacteria (drawn based on Abelsalam et al, 2018; 2019).
PurposeThis paper was formulated to address the impact of different individual decision modes on purchasing managers' satisfaction and find out whether different environments could influence the ...strength of the relationship between the sourcing managers' individual modes and their decisions.Design/methodology/approachA new model was built based on the variables selected from literature. Two identical surveys were sent to manufacturing firms in China and Egypt. Around 450 questionnaires have been sent to respondents, and about 300 responses have been collected in the two countries.FindingsThe key findings of this study showed that although the influence of decision modes is not changeable across decision-makers in different markets' environment, the strength of the relationship between different individual decision modes and the buying decision significantly differed across different dynamic task environments of buyers.Originality/valueThe research in this paper focused on the purchasing managers' individual decision-making. On the other hand, purchasing managers' market environment is rarely recognized as a main factor affecting their decisions. Furthermore, this research tries to understand more about the supplier selection decision-making in Eastern Asian and Middle Eastern countries.
Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are recently getting high attention from different researchers due to increasing traffic problems, especially in densely populated countries. Increasing rates of ...accidents call for an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) with efficient performance to reduce and mitigate this trend. The required enhancement of the ITS can be more focused on traffic performance, integrity, and reduction of the vehicles’ CO2 emissions. Existing routing protocols for VANETs consider different situations and methods to establish reliable communication between the vehicles and infrastructures. However other situations have not been addressed carefully like the link stability between vehicles during packet exchange. This paper develops an Obstacle Prediction Based Routing Protocol (OPBRP) for vehicle detection, packets transmission to Roadside Units (RSU) and choosing a better route in terms of reliability via using vehicle's Kinematics and Mobility prediction in VANET. Two fundamental contributions are included in this paper: (1) Upgrading prediction routing protocol to transfer packets using a reliable path, and (2) Adding new logic in choosing the intermediate nodes to the destination to achieve a higher Packet delivery ratio (PDR). The OPBRP uses the predictive greedy as forwarding algorithm and the predictive perimeter forwarding as recovery algorithm after introducing enhancements to both algorithms to meet the requirements of VANETs environment. To materialize the value achieved from the mentioned contributions we tested the newly developed OPBRP against the existing routing protocols using Vehicle in Network Simulation (Veins) which shows that our proposed protocol outperformed current existing routing protocols in terms of PDR by achieving 18.46% improvement, end-to-end delay (E2E-Delay) by achieving 10.51% improvement, and total power consumption used in transmission by achieving 23.80% improvement.
This book provides useful information about pyrolysis, which includes the pyrolysis of biomass and pyrolysis of fossil fuels and petrochemicals. Additionally, this book elucidates and illustrates ...further innovative pyrolysis processes such as catalytic pyrolysis, spray pyrolysis, and microwave-assisted pyrolysis. This book discusses the production of semiconductors and nanomaterials through the pyrolysis process.
