Search

Report containing an analysis of existing Research and Innovation strategies and a definition of EUTOPIA- TRAIN themes and common research agenda, Deliverable 1.1 for EUTOPIA-TRAIN. Deliverable not yet approved by the European Commission.

The Icelandic sagas describe Icelanders travelling throughout the medieval world. But their stories were also written down during a time of unrest, when Icelandic society was under great pressure from Norwegian political influence. The images of these far-travellers – like the men who went east to serve foreign kings, and the men and women who sailed the dangerous seas to the west, to discover and colonise new lands – can reveal aspects of author intent and values. This thesis explains how stories of far-travellers and journeys provide a literary response by their authors, articulating their sense of an emerging Icelandic identity.

The variability in viscosity and combustion quality has been identified from the literature as a barrier to the use of biodiesel fuels in motorsport. These parameters can affect performance, emissions and fuel consumption. Diesel engines have had recent success in endurance and touring car racing; biodiesel is an opportunity to increase the sustainability of this emerging area of motorsport.\ud \ud Methyl esters from rapeseed, soybean and sunflower oils were tested alongside EN 590 diesel fuel. Variations in fuel consumption, output torque and power were observed between the fuels. Further tests were carried out on an automotive diesel engine to evaluate the in-cylinder pressures for soybean B100, beef tallow B50 and EN 590 to gain understanding of the reasons behind the performance differences noted in the initial tests.\ud \ud Retarding the start of injection for B50 and B100 biodiesel improved the peak torque by up to 5% enabling the production of equal torque at the same engine speed when compared to EN 590 but with lower peak in-cylinder pressure and a shorter ignition delay. The application of this to motorsport is the potential to achieve higher peak power outputs; the shorter ignition delay and more rapid combustion has the potential to be used to raise the maximum engine speed and therefore the peak power output of diesel engines for motorsport.

Sustainability assessments require the management of a wide variety of information types, parameters and uncertainties. Multi criteriadecision analysis(MCDA) has been regarded as a suitable set of methods to perform sustainability evaluations as a result of its flexibility and the possibility of facilitating the dialogue between stakeholders, analysts and scientists. However, it has been reported that researchers do not usually properly define the reasons for choosing a certain MCDA method instead of another. Familiarity and affinity with a certain approach seem to be the drivers for the choice of a certain procedure. This reviewpaperpresents the performance of five MCDA methods (i.e. MAUT, AHP, PROMETHEE, ELECTRE and DRSA) in respect to ten crucial criteria that sustainability assessments tools should satisfy, among which are a life cycle perspective, thresholds and uncertainty management, software support and ease of use. The review shows that MAUT and AHP are fairly simple to understand and have good software support, but they are cognitively demanding for the decision makers, and can only embrace a weak sustainability perspective as trade-offs are the norm. Mixed information and uncertainty can be managed by all the methods, while robust results can only be obtained with MAUT. ELECTRE, PROMETHEE and DRSA are non-compensatory approaches which consent to use a strong sustainability concept, accept a variety of thresholds, but suffer from rank reversal. DRSA is less demanding in terms of preference elicitation, is very easy to understand and provides a straightforward set of decision rules expressed in the form of elementary “if … then …” conditions. Dedicated software is available for all the approaches with a medium to wide range of results capability representation. DRSA emerges as the easiest method, followed by AHP, PROMETHEE and MAUT, while ELECTRE is regarded as fairly difficult. Overall, the analysis has shown that most of the requirements are satisfied by the MCDA methods (although to different extents) with the exclusion of management of mixed data types and adoption of life cycle perspective which are covered by all the considered approaches.

During the last few decades, phytoremediation process has attracted much attention because of the growing concerns about the deteriorating quality of soil caused by anthropogenic activities. Here, a tandem phytoremediation/biorefinery process was proposed as a way to turn phytoremediation into a viable commercial method by producing valuable chemicals in addition to cleaned soil. Two agricultural plants (Sinapis alba and Helianthus annuus) were grown in moderately contaminated soil with ca. 100 ppm of Ni and further degraded by a fungal lignin degrader - Phanerochaete chrysosporium. Several parameters have been studied: the viability of plants, biomass yield and their accumulating and remediating potentials. Further down-stream processing showed that up to 80% of Ni can be easily extracted from contaminated biomass by aqueous extraction at mild conditions. Finally, it was demonstrated that the grown onto contaminated soil plants can be degraded by Phanerochaete chrysosporium and the effect of nickel and biomass pre-treatment on the solid state fermentation was studied. The proposed and studied in this work methodology can pave the way to successful commercialization of the phytoremediation process in the near future