稻壳综合利用的最佳途径

简述了稻壳综合利用现状，介绍了稻壳成型工艺及铁水保温及转炉炼钢方面的应用，并比较了稻壳块同其他保温剂性能的优劣，实践证明，成型后的稻壳块用于铁水保温及转炉冶炼过程中的喷溅和溢渣控制技术上，所产生的经济和社会效益是巨大的，也是其它稻壳综合利用途径所无法比拟的，钢铁冶金工业，是稻壳综合利用的最佳途径。     

车用三效催化转化器发展概况

从载体及三效催化剂角度论述了车用三效催化转化器的发展；指出了影响车用三效催化转化器性能的因素，这些因素的作用是协同的；为提高催化转化器的性能，必须采用系统的方法对其进行优化设计。     

城市供水管网二次加氯研究进展

传统城市供水管网一般在净水厂实行消毒以减少用户受到病原体及各种水传播疾病的危害.既要保证足够的氯残留,又要减少过量氯产生的气味和可能的消毒副产物(DBPs),传统的消毒方法经常是不可能的.为了解决这对矛盾,二次加氯将会是个很好的解决策略.二次加氯的优势已经吸引了国内外许多专家学者的关注,对二次加氯的研究进展进行了综合的论述,从新的角度对现有的优化模型进行了分类,并比较和推荐了认为可行或相对较好的模型.     

Who cares? Individual contributions to pup care by breeders vs non-breeders in the cooperatively breeding banded mongoose (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Mungos mungo</Emphasis>)

Knowledge of the investment rules adopted by breeders and non-breeders, and the factors that affect them, is essential to understanding cooperative breeding as part of a life-history tactic. Although the factors that affect relative contributions to care of young have been studied in some cooperative bird species, there is little data on mammals, making coherent generalisations within mammals and across taxa difficult. In this study, we investigate individual contributions to pup escorting, a strong predictor of offspring provisioning, in the banded mongoose (Mungos mungo), a cooperatively breeding mammal in which reproductive skew is low. Contributions by those under a year old (which virtually never breed) increased with age and body weight but were generally low. Among older age classes (yearlings and adults), individuals that had not bred in the current litter generally contributed less to escorting than those that had bred (with the exception of yearling males). In addition, females that did not breed reduced their investment if they were heavy presumably because such females are more likely to breed in the following event and benefit from saving resources for this. The generally greater contributions by breeders in banded mongooses contrast with the recent findings in meerkats (Suricata suricatta), another obligatorily cooperative mongoose with similar group size but wherein reproductive skew is high. Our results suggest that relative contributions by breeders vs non-breeders are not dependent on group size but on the ratio of breeders to carers and the probability that non-breeders will breed in the near future.     

Optimal maternal investment in the dung beetle<Emphasis Type="Italic"> Onthophagus taurus</Emphasis>?

Optimal investment theory is based on the assumption that the proximate constraint acting on parental investment is resource based. A trade-off between per offspring investment and total investment seems intuitive. Consequently, a parents investment strategy is expected to represent a trade-off between the benefits of investment for current offspring and the costs to future reproduction for parents. In this study, we provide clear evidence that the costs and benefits of maternal provisioning in the dung beetle Onthophagus taurus influence the amount of provisions provided by the mother. Horse dung is typically of a higher nutritional value than cow dung and females were shown to provide 20% less dung to offspring when provisioning with horse dung. By reducing their investment per offspring and exhibiting a clear preference to provision offspring with horse dung, females were able to produce significantly more offspring. Females provisioning with horse dung received greater fitness returns per unit of investment and experienced lower provisioning costs, in terms of the minimum amount of dung required to produce a surviving offspring, than females provisioning with cow dung. Females provisioning in soil of low moisture content were found to have higher tunneling costs than those provisioning in soil of high moisture content, while the fitness returns per unit of investment did not differ. We adopted a marginal value theorem (MVT) approach to calculate the theoretical optimal level of investment for each dung type and for each soil moisture. Predicted levels of provisioning were lower for horse dung than for cow dung and for moist soil than for dry soil. Therefore, the results of this study are in qualitative agreement with MVT predictions and provide empirical support for the proposal that females can adaptively adjust their level of investment in response to resource and/or habitat quality. However, the theoretically predicted optimal investment yielded a poor quantitative fit with our observed levels of investment, with females providing over twice the investment predicted by the MVT approach. We suggest that this difference may reflect either our inability in directly quantifying all the necessary costs and benefits of investment in O. taurus and/or the applicability of the underlying assumptions of MVT.Communicated by D. Gwynne     

Indirect defense in a highly specific ant–plant mutualism

Although associations between myrmecophytes and their plant ants are recognized as a particularly effective form of protective mutualism, their functioning remains incompletely understood. This field study examined the ant-plant Hirtella physophora and its obligate ant associate Allomerus decemarticulatus. We formulated two hypotheses on the highly specific nature of this association: (1) Ant presence should be correlated with a marked reduction in the amount of herbivory on the plant foliage; (2) ant activity should be consistent with the "optimal defense" theory predicting that the most vulnerable and valuable parts of the plant are the best defended. We validated the first hypothesis by demonstrating that for ant-excluded plants, expanding leaves, but also newly matured ones in the long term, suffered significantly more herbivore damage than ant-inhabited plants. We showed that A. decemarticulatus workers represent both constitutive and inducible defenses for their host, by patrolling its foliage and rapidly recruiting nestmates to foliar wounds. On examining how these activities change according to the leaves’ developmental stage, we found that the number of patrolling ants dramatically decreased as the leaves matured, while leaf wounds induced ant recruitment regardless of the leaf’s age. The resulting level of these indirect defenses was roughly proportional to leaf vulnerability and value during its development, thus validating our second hypothesis predicting optimal protection. This led us to discuss the factors influencing ant activity on the plant’s surface. Our study emphasizes the importance of studying both the constitutive and inducible components of indirect defense when evaluating its efficacy and optimality.     

A bioeconomic model of a single-species fishery with a marine reserve

This study examines the impact of the creation of marine protected areas (MPAs), from both economic and biological perspectives. In particular, we examine the effects of protected patches and harvesting on resource populations. We conclude that protected patches are an effective means of conserving resource populations, even though extinction cannot be prevented in all cases. We discuss the dynamic optimization of a harvest policy by choosing E(t), the harvesting effort, as the dynamic variable. We also discuss the optimal equilibrium harvest policy and explain the biological and bioeconomic interpretations of the results.     

A methodology for optimal MSW management,with an application in the waste transportation of Attica Region,Greece

The paper describes a software system capable of formulating alternative optimal Municipal Solid Wastes (MSWs) management plans, each of which meets a set of constraints that may reflect selected objections and/or wishes of local communities. The objective function to be minimized in each plan is the sum of the annualized capital investment and annual operating cost of all transportation, treatment and final disposal operations involved, taking into consideration the possible income from the sale of products and any other financial incentives or disincentives that may exist. For each plan formulated, the system generates several reports that define the plan, analyze its cost elements and yield an indicative profile of selected types of installations, as well as data files that facilitate the geographic representation of the optimal solution in maps through the use of GIS. A number of these reports compare the technical and economic data from all scenarios considered at the study area, municipality and installation level constituting in effect sensitivity analysis. The generation of alternative plans offers local authorities the opportunity of choice and the results of the sensitivity analysis allow them to choose wisely and with consensus.The paper presents also an application of this software system in the capital Region of Attica in Greece, for the purpose of developing an optimal waste transportation system in line with its approved waste management plan. The formulated plan was able to: (a) serve 113 Municipalities and Communities that generate nearly 2 million t/y of comingled MSW with distinctly different waste collection patterns, (b) take into consideration several existing waste transfer stations (WTS) and optimize their use within the overall plan, (c) select the most appropriate sites among the potentially suitable (new and in use) ones, (d) generate the optimal profile of each WTS proposed, and (e) perform sensitivity analysis so as to define the impact of selected sets of constraints (limitations in the availability of sites and in the capacity of their installations) on the design and cost of the ensuing optimal waste transfer system. The results show that optimal planning offers significant economic savings to municipalities, while reducing at the same time the present levels of traffic, fuel consumptions and air emissions in the congested Athens basin.     

Modeling groundwater flow and its associated environmental problem in a lowland coastal plain: a first step towards a sustainable development plan

Groundwater is an important resource in the alluvial coastal lowland plains. In the Shiroishi lowland plain, southwestern Kyushu Island of Japan, land subsidence due to groundwater development has long been recognized as an environmental issue. Land subsidence can have several negative economic and social implications. In this study, an integrated numerical groundwater and land subsidence model, which combines a three-dimensional numerical groundwater flow model and a one-dimensional soil consolidation model, was used to simulate the dynamic groundwater flow and ground subsidence due to pumping. On the other hand, a groundwater optimization model was also formulated to search for an optimal safe yield of groundwater pumping without violating physical, environmental, social-economic constraints. The model results reveal that groundwater levels in the aquifers greatly vary from season to season in response to varying climatic and pumping conditions. Consequently, land subsidence has rapidly occurred throughout the area with the central prone in Shiroishi plain. The study also proposes a countermeasure against subsiding process in the area by means of numerical models. The optimization model result suggests that pumping can be increased in the northern part of the study area without leading to significant land subsidence.     

Modelling optimal exploitation of petroleum resources in India

In this paper, the exploitation of petroleum resources in India is analyzed by developing a dynamic optimization modeling framework—PETEX. This model combines the practical aspects in determining optimal rates of extraction of oil and gas from a reservoir with a hybrid approach to estimating the discovery rate of petroleum resources in the future, additionally incorporating a stochastic specification to capture the uncertainty associated with discovery. The model acts as an aid to joint production–investment decision making for the entire supply process from drilling through production and in determining the import requirement to meet the country’s oil demand. The model results and sensitivity analysis suggest an acute requirement of sustained infusion of investment into the various upstream activities at a rate much higher than the current levels in order to bridge the demand—supply gap for crude oil. With the opening up of the Indian economy, it is hoped that the participation of the private sector in upstream activities would increase thereby increasing the investments available for upstream activity.