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Irrigated agriculture is threatened by soil salinity in numerous arid and semi-arid areas of the world, chiefly caused by the use of highly salinity irrigation water, compounded by excessive evapotranspiration. Given this threat, efficient field assessment methods are needed to monitor the dynamics of soil salinity in salt-affected irrigated lands and evaluate the performance of management strategies. In this study, we report on the results of an irrigation experiment with the main objective of evaluating time-lapse inversion of electromagnetic induction (EMI) data and hydrological modelling in field assessment of soil salinity dynamics. Four experimental plots were established and irrigated 12 times during a 2-month period, with water at four different salinity levels (1, 4, 8 and 12 dS m−1) using a drip irrigation system. Time-lapse apparent electrical conductivity (σa) data were collected four times during the experiment period using the CMD Mini-Explorer. Prior to inversion of time-lapse σa data, a numerical experiment was performed by 2D simulations of the water and solute infiltration and redistribution process in synthetic transects, generated by using the statistical distribution of the hydraulic properties in the study area. These simulations gave known spatio-temporal distribution of water contents and solute concentrations and thus of bulk electrical conductivity (σb), which in turn were used to obtain known structures of apparent electrical conductivity, σa. These synthetic distributions were used for a preliminary understanding of how the physical context may influence the EMI-based σa readings carried out in the monitored transects as well as being used to optimize the smoothing parameter to be used in the inversion of σa readings. With this prior information at hand, we inverted the time-lapse field σa data and interpreted the results in terms of concentration distributions over time. The proposed approach, using preliminary hydrological simulations to understand the potential role of the variability of the physical system to be monitored by EMI, may actually allow for a better choice of the inversion parameters and interpretation of EMI readings, thus increasing the potentiality of using the electromagnetic induction technique for rapid and non-invasive investigation of spatio-temporal variability in soil salinity over large areas.

Transfer functions are travel time probability density functions (TT pdfs), which describe the leaching behaviour in a given soil profile. Once they are defined, the output solute concentration at a given time and depth is simply the transfer function convolution with the input concentration signal to the system.In this work we propose an extended version of Jury's transfer function model (TFM-ext). The proposed model allows to simulate the spatio-temporal distribution of nonpoint-source solutes along the unsaturated zone that: i) integrates a simplified statistical approach with the physically-based soil hydrological parameters; ii) is valid for wide range of applications, both in space and time; iii) is standard and easily replicable; iv) is easy to interpret.With the assumptions of a) a gravity induced water flow, b) a conservative and nonreactive solute and c) a purely convective flow, ignoring the convective mixing of solute flowing at different velocities and the molecular diffusion, the TT pdf were calculated as functions of the unsaturated hydraulic conductivity k(θ). The strength of the model, despite its important assumptions, is that it derives the TT pdf from a physical quantity, i.e. the hydraulic conductivity function. Moreover, the model extends the transport process to the generic depth z, where information on the hydraulic properties could not be available, assuming a lognormal travel time pdf, whose parameters are scaled according to the generalized transfer function model.A sensitivity analysis, based on Monte Carlo simulations, to evaluate to which parameters the TFM-ext is more sensitive, was performed. Results shown that θs and τ, of the van Genuchten-Mualem model, are the parameter affecting more the mean travel times.Moreover, in order to validate TFM-ext, an application in the Telesina Valley, a hilly area of 200 km2 in Southern Italy, was performed. Forty-six soil profiles, completely characterized from the hydrological point of view, were used to evaluate the mean travel times and then compared with the results obtained with a notable physically based model, Hydrus 1D. Two distinct applications were performed: the first with constant upper boundary conditions equal to those applied to the TFM-ext exercise, and the second with real daily variable upper boundary conditions. Results of both cases gave very high correlation coefficients (above 0.8) and mean absolute errors of 30 and 40 days, respectively.Eventually, the model was implemented as an operative tool for the groundwater vulnerability assessment within the geospatial Decision Support System developed for LANDSUPPORT H2020 project.

Exhaust gases are a very real threat to human life and the environment. A wide range of pollutants and greenhouse gases are produced in combustion processes such as particulates, SOx, NOx, CO2, etc. While there are accepted technologies available to remove most of these pollutants suitable processes for CO2 separation have not yet been developed or are limited. One of the challenges for CO2 separation from exhaust gas is the complexity of CO2/N2 separation. However, membrane separation processes by postcombustion, precombustion, and oxy-combustion can be used for CO2 separation from exhaust gas. The main propose of postcombustion process is focused on the separation of CO2 from exhaust gas and it should be regarded that usually partial pressure of CO2 is very low. Polymeric CO2 selective membranes are the best choice for CO2 separation from common exhausted gases. In precombustion processes, fuels convert to a stream of CO2 and H2 and oxy-combustion processes replace the pure oxygen to achieve a high concentration of CO2 exhaust. Moreover, ion transport membranes are applicable in oxy-combustion processes, and a wide range of high-temperature-resistant H2 selective membranes can be used for the precombustion process. In this chapter, membrane-assisted pre-, oxy-, and postcombustion processes are discussed.

Pd-based membranes are the most studied in applications of membrane reactors in the field of high grade hydrogen production. The main issues of Pd-membranes such as high cost and relatively low hydrogen permeability limit their wide development at larger scale, favoring other inorganic materials such as silica to be used as membrane for hydrogen generation/purification. Therefore, this theoretical study aims to evaluate the performance of silica (4 mm of thickness and 5 cm of active length) and Pd Ag (50 μm thick and 5 cm of active length) membrane reactors exercised at the same operating conditions and using the same reaction kinetics to produce hydrogen from methanol steam reforming reaction. Furthermore, an equivalent traditional reactor is studied for comparison. A computational fluid dynamics model was developed, firstly validating the former with experimental literature data. The effects of reaction pressure and temperature on the reactors performance in terms of hydrogen yield, methanol conversion and CO selectivity were hence studied and discussed. The simulations via CFD method indicated that the silica membrane reactor results to be the best solution over the Pd Ag MR and the TR as well, presenting the best simulation results at 513 K, 10 bar, sweep-factor = 6, GHSV = 6000 h−1 and feed molar ratio = 3/1 with CO selectivity equal to 0.04%, methanol conversion and hydrogen yield >90%.

Soil sealing is considered one of the most dangerous land degradation processes on global, European and national scales. Numerous policies aiming to mitigate this soil threat testify the importance of the phenomenon, which however is continuously growing, or at least does not shows signs of abating. Here we would show a spatial decision support system (S-DSS) – based on a Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure – with the aim of applying it as an operational instrument aiming towards soil sealing mitigation. The system developed within the framework of the LANDSUPPORT EU project (www.landsupport.eu) started on May 2018 has the ambition to impact on those who take decision over soil sealing issues. It currently represents an evolution of a previous S-DSS tool named Soil sealing and landscape planning, still operational and described in a scientific publication (https://doi.org/10.1002/ldr.2802). The system, focusing on mitigating such crucial land degradation, allows the users - freely and via the Web – to produce ‘what-if’ land planning scenarios thanks to the ‘on-the-fly’ modelling engines. Therefore, integrated geospatial quantitative data and procedures may be directly and freely used by planners. The system is continuously evolving and is thought to function on the fly from local (administrative limits) to the European scale, addressing among others the issues of rural fragmentation, loss of soil ecosystem services, estimates of soil sealing evolution over time, etc. The tool is being developed with the help of end users and indirectly explores a change of paradigm where soil science and landscape/urban planning work together to provide operational instruments that may be adopted by local communities in addressing soil sealing issues with a proactive approach.

Olive cultivation is a very important activity which performs several important ecological functions in many inland areas. Recent progress in modelling and Decision Support Systems (DSS) applied to agriculture promises to deliver important positive changes. However, most of this progress regards agriculture systems other than olive growing, so failing to challenge the environmental dimension of the olive grove and the landscape, which is a key issue in the planning and management of olive cultivation. This paper aims to demonstrate that a new type of DSS developed upon the open-source Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure (GCI) platform (named GeOlive) can provide a very important web-based operational tool for olive growing as it better connects productivity and environmental sustainability. This GCI platform supports the acquisition, management, and processing of both static and dynamic data (e.g. pedology, daily climate), data visualization, and computer on-the-fly applications in order to perform simulation modelling (e.g. evaluation of bioclimatic indices), all potentially accessible via the Web. The DSS tool, applied to an area of 20,000 ha in southern Italy, is designed to assist olive grove planning and management and provide operational support for farmers, farmer associations and decision makers involved in olive grove landscape. DSS outputs include olive grove planning and management scenario analysis and maps, together with evaluation of potential and current plant water stress. A short selection of practical case studies is presented to show the different use cases of the proposed DSS.

Exhaust gas cleaning is a key process needed for a wide range of industrial plants for reducing pollutant emissions. Different types of pollutants which cause to greenhouse effect are produced in combustion media such as fly ash, NOx, SOx, CO2, acid gas, and dioxins and furans (PCDD/F) requiring a variety processes for separation of these pollutants from exhaust gas. The exhaust gas cleaning process is a multistep system where the first step is usually fly ash separation. Common technologies used for dust separation from exhaust gas include cyclones, electrostatic precipitators, and filters. There are some other materials like acid gasses and Hg which are completely separate from exhaust gas. After this, adsorption processes or selective catalytic reduction processes can be used for PCDD/F elimination from flue gas. NOx, SOx, and CO2 are the pollutants separated at the end of the exhaust gas cleaning process line. Unlike NOx removal technologies, CO2 separation processes are not scaled up to industrial size but some carbon dioxide capture and storage processes for industrial plants have been reported. In this chapter, conventional processes for exhaust gas cleaning are discussed and some of the latest achievements are reported.

One of the best-known greenhouse gases, CO2, has been increasing in the last decade of about 1.7%. To overcome the well-known global problems related to this gas, researchers of all over the world are working very hard in order to develop any strategies to seriously solve this issue. In this chapter, the authors focus their attention on one of the possible solutions to the problem: bacteria that are CO2 capture cells which have carried out this task since ancient times. In our work we make an excursus on all the biochemical processes of CO2 capture carried out by bacteria, ending with a detailed comparison of the most studied enzymes. One of the alternatives will be to genetically modify the organisms known to date to speed up their conversion process.

Geo-Spatial Decision Support Systems (S-DSS) can be usefully employed to support the acquisition, management, and processing of both static and dynamic data (e.g., daily climate), data visualization, and computer on-the-fly applications in order to perform simulation modelling all potentially accessible via the Web. S-DSS are becoming more popular by providing operational tools to a large community of end-users and policy-makers for a sustainable landscape management (i.e. for both agriculture and environmental protection) at different spatial and temporal scales.The scope of this work is to present the implementation of the extended Transfer Function Model (TFM-ext) – described in a companion abstract presented in the same session – as an operative tool for the groundwater vulnerability assessment within the larger S-DSS developed for LandSupport H2020 project (https://www.landsupport.eu).The tool allows to simulate the mean travel times of a generic solute at different spatio-temporal scales (from the local to the regional scale), considering different land uses.In particular, operatively, the end-user can evaluate the filtering capacity of the soils, by: i) defining the region of interest; ii) defining the simulation period; iii) choosing between 6 different land use scenarios (bare soil, alpha-alpha, maize, vine, olive and wheat) or consider his/her own management scenario; iv) defining the depth of interest at which evaluate the solute arrival.The outputs are i) the mean travel times that the input solute (given as a fertilizer concentration related to the land-use scenario) takes to reach the defined depth and ii) the quantity of the input solute that reaches the defined depth after one year from its injection.The latter information is then associated to the filtering capacity of the soil, which are thus classified according to the percentage of input mass arrived after one year.The model was implemented as open source Java application, following the standard of the flexibility to changes and to future expansions, of the optimized computational demand and parallelization, required by the project.Three local scale cases are available at the moment (Telesina Valley-IT, Marchfeld-AT and Zala County-HU). Future developments will aim to apply TFM-ext towards larger European spatial extent areas (e.g. regional scales). Furthermore, future develoments will aim to support selected implementations of Water Framework and Nitrates directives, especially with respect to the systematic required mapping revision of Nitrate Vulnerable Zone and the adoption of best practice.

Membrane engineering is a well-established technology adopted in various scientific fields, resulting of great interest in hydrogen production and purification processes as well as in precombustion CO2 capture. This chapter focuses on the impact of membrane and membrane reactor technology combined to renewable feedstock exploitation in the viewpoint of hydrogen economy development and the environmental protection, highlighting the benefits over the conventional technologies due to the application of the principles of the process intensification strategy.

Today, membrane technology represents a well-established technology adopted by several fields of scientific interest, but particularly attracting in hydrogen generation and purification as well as in precombustion CO2 capture. This chapter describes how membrane and membrane reactor technology may impact on the hydrogen economy and the environmental protection pursuing the principles of the process intensification strategy combined with the advantages determined by the utilization of renewable bio-derived feedstocks for the fuel processing.

The fundamental resource of economic, social, and cultural development of the world is water. A very small amount of the global water is available for direct accessibility. Unfortunately, this limited amount of available global water is being polluted by industrial plants. The ever-evolving and increasing strict regulatory standards for discharging effluents from industries pose huge environmental and economic implications because of bulk deposition in the environment. While the world faces an increased scarcity in freshwater supply, it is of great importance that the wastewater from the industries can be treated, recycled, and reused. Reverse osmosis (RO) can be applied to process or convert industrial wastewater into clean water or into effluents that can be recycled directly to the environment or reused for other purpose. This chapter provides an overview on the use of RO in the treatment of different industrial wastewaters analyzing specific challenges and perspectives. The major sources of industrial wastewaters, their characterization, and specific pretreatments are also analyzed and discussed.

One of the most important problems in the worldwide community is the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable sources. In fact, in the last years, intense efforts from research groups around the world have been made in the development of the transformation from biomass to bioenergy in terms of yield and economic sustainability. In particular, one of the most promising renewable sources is considered lignocellulosic biomass for the following reasons: it has high productivity, requires low agricultural inputs, has positive environmental impacts, is easy to process, and does not compete with food crops. In particular, from this raw material is possible to obtain different types of biofuels such as syngas, biooil, and bioethanol. This chapter is focused on the production of bioethanol from renewable sources and aims to give an overview on the various steps of the production processes and the implementation of the technology by membrane reactors.

Although reverse osmosis (RO) is recognized as a leading technology in desalination processes, it is also a well-established application in food processing due to its several advantages over conventional methodologies such as the preservation of thermal-sensitive compounds, low energy consumption, and low investment costs. This chapter focuses on the main applications of RO in food processing, including the concentration of fruit and vegetable juices, preconcentration of milk and whey, improvement of must quality, and wine dealcoholization. The contribution of RO to the recovery of biologically active compounds from agrofood wastewaters, according to the new industrial ecology and biorefinery concepts, is also presented and discussed. In this area, the combination of RO with other membrane filtration systems well contributes in redesigning the traditional processing of food and beverages within the logic of the process intensification strategy, with remarkable benefits in terms of product quality, plant compactness, environmental impact, and energetic aspects. These aspects are addressed and discussed in detail according to the latest literature inputs.

This work proposes a new type of web-based geospatial decision support system—called Soil Monitor—which provides a multidisciplinary operational tool useful for a multi-stakeholder community to challenge soil sealing. Various technological and technical features of Soil Monitor are presented and discussed with particular reference to the combination of WebGIS with on-the-fly geospatial processing based on GPU computing, specifically designed to allow real-time requests. In addition, we present three quantitative analysis of soil sealing at three different scales. The study at national level illustrated that the type of land use strongly affected soil-sealing dynamics. Indeed, the classcomplex cultivation patternresulted the most fragile land use whileforestsresulted the most resilient one. The study at province level illustrated the key importance of having on-the-fly the map of rural fragmentation for any Italian province. This map—quantifying the landscape integrity of the rural and natural areas—enables to better locate both new green corridors or new urban developments minimizing the environmental impact of human activities. The study at municipality level demonstrated the importance of quantifying a pool of spatial planning indicators and illustrated that (a) the largest urban dispersion occurs in hilly touristic municipalities close to the sea, (b) the increase in soil sealing in rural sites is not related to population growth. As a result, Soil Monitor is deemed useful both to support decision making at different spatial scales and to raise awareness in people, professionals, and experts of other fields. Keywords soil sealing, geospatial decision support system, compute unified device architecture, graphical processing unit computing, urban planning.

In this work, a novel loop is designed for simultaneous production of pure hydrogen and synthesis gas (syngas) from a domestic refinery purge gas. The purge gases are the combination of flare gas (consist mainly of methane) and high-temperature flue gas (containing CO2 and steam). The proposed loop including three main parts: 1) flare gas desulfurization unit; 2) CO2 and steam recovery unit and, 3) a membrane reformer for combined dry-steam reforming of methane, heating with high-temperature flue gas. The hazardous hot gases convert to valuable products instead of discharging to the atmosphere. A steady-state one-dimensional model is used to predict the loop performance. The results show that 55.5% of methane conversion can be achieved from the purge gases consisting of 797 kmol/h flare gas and 17,200 kmol/h flue gas. The proposed process can produce 338 kmol/h of pure hydrogen and 1,209 kmol/h of syngas. In addition, the effects of purge gas properties and process modifications on the loop performance were investigated. The method presented in this work is a promising alternative to reduce purge gas released to the atmosphere from industrial plants. This can result in a significant reduction in CO2 emissions that causes global warming.

The main concept of the "Hydrogen Economy" includes the intent of representing an energy infrastructure useful to replace the world petroleum fuels exploitation. Indeed, hydrogen is a versatile compound that, a part from the current industrial applications (ammonia and methanol production), may be directly used as a fuel in combustion engines or in fuel cells to generate green power for both stationary and mobile applications. These potentialities are attracting special interests particularly in the countries in which the utilization of derived of fossil fuels is impressive. Furthermore, the "hydrogen economy" plays an important role as an alternative vision of the future energy infrastructure in solving the current issues related the climate change and environmental pollution caused by the harmful emissions of the derived of fossil fuels utilization. Hence, this book describes the perspectives of application for a number of alternative technologies including solar, membrane and membrane reactors (MRs), electrolysis, bio-reactors etc. in the framework of hydrogen generation, its utilization as a green fuel and the consequent future impact at industrial scale.

The fourteenth edition of HYdrogen - POwer THeoretical and Engineering Solutions International Symposium (HYPOTHESIS XIV) was held from 24th to 26th April 2019 in Foz-do-Iguaçu (Brazil) and chaired by Dr. Massimiliano Lo Faro, Daniel A. Cantane and Edson A. Ticianelli. The purpose of the HYPOTHESIS series is to provide a forum where representatives from industry, public laboratories, universities and government agencies can meet, discuss and present the most recent advances in Hydrogen and Renewable Energy Sources technologies. The Hypothesis' conferences are traditionally centred on the role of hydrogen and related technologies in the value chain from renewable energy sources to users and represents a stimulating place for a professional development and for establishing fruitful collaborations. In addition to the traditional topics of Hypothesis series, the XIV edition of Hypothesis held at Foz-do-Iguaçu has emphasized also the role of new technologies for power-to-gas and for energy recovery from any renewable source. "Smart technologies for green life" was the motto of this edition of Hypothesis and the well-known hydroelectric power plant of ITAIPU has interpreted at the highest level the role of renewables in this transition. The conference has been supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (# 401555/2018-6 CNPq-Brazil), Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (# 88881.290304/2018-01 CAPES-Brazil), the Italian Hydrogen Forum (www.h2forum.it), the International Association of Hydrogen Energy (http://www.iahe.org) and also by the Fundação Parque Tecnológico Itaipu - FTPI (Brazil) and the Institute for Advanced Energy Technologies "Nicola Giordano" of the National Research Council (CNR-ITAE, Italy). Prof. Sanjeev Mukerjee (Northeastern University), prof. Andreas Friedrich (German Aerospace Center), and dr. Cord-Henrich Dustmann (Battery Consult AG) have exposed their recent scientific achievements as plenary speakers. Furthermore, more than 150 people from all over the world have attended with their scientific works, attracted from the themes of Hypothesis XIV and from this unique city hosting one of the seven modern wonders of the world. As a closing remark of this conference, a round-table discussion towards the role of Hydrogen in Latino America has been hosted. We are in debt with prof. Paulo Emilio V. de Miranda which has chaired magnificently this round table which involved as speakers the major players from Latino-American hydrogen societies (i.e. Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Mexico). In addition, we are deeply in debt to all the people that contributed to the success of the meeting, and to this special issue. We like to thank to all of the reviewers and authors, who participated in this process, the scientific committee and all the attendants to HYPOTHESIS XIV. Not the least the editorial staff of IJHE for its kindly collaboration. Without them, this special issue would not have been possible. We also like to thank the members of the international board, the scientific board and a special thanks go to Giuseppe Spazzafumo as the coordinator of Conference series and all member of the organizing committees (e.g. Vincenzo Baglio (CNR-ITAE), Liliane Cristina Battirola (UNILA), José Ricardo Cezar Salgado (UNILA), Fabio Coral Fonseca (IPEN), Orazio Di Blasi (CNR-ITAE), Janaina Fernandes Gomes (UFSCAR), Ricardo José Ferracin (PTI), Renata Figueredo Martins (UFMG), Massimo Laganà (CNR-ITAE), Francesco Lufrano (CNR-ITAE), Tulio Matencio (UFMG), Paulo Emilio de Miranda (UFRJ), Flavio Ryoichi Nikkuni, Gaetano Squadrito (CNR-ITAE), Pietro Staiti (CNR-ITAE) and Sabrina Campagna Zignani (CNR-ITAE)) those have spent lot of their energies in the 12 months needed for the conference organisation and realisation. This special issue collects a selection of invited papers covering the topics more related to renewable energy sources and technologies, discussed during the conference. We are confident that the readers of this journal may appreciate the survey of results and progress recently achieved in this field presented in this SI. These papers have undergone a rigorous peer-review process according to the high quality standards of the Journal.

Because of recent advances, separation processes based on membrane technology are being increasingly considered as good alternatives to conventional methods used for treatment of water and wastewater. Researchers are finding that membrane technology offers reduced environmental impact and high efficiency. Because of economic problems and high cost of membrane based separations which have caused to their application limitation and most of the costs belong to operating and capital costs which membranes associated. This chapter discusses membrane technology applications in wastewater and water treatment from an economic viewpoint. The consequences of extensive experimental models got to decide the expense of treatment utilizing of membranes which are used for ultrafiltration and microfiltration processes. The major variables affecting the expense were observed to be the cost of the membrane and its replacement, power, and membrane replacement recurrence. The significance of choosing the most reasonable membrane and optimal operational requirements are illustrated. A comparative study between conventional treatment methods and expenses of membrane frameworks has been made. Some economically important topics have been highlighted in membrane usage.

Integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants are a safe method of electricity production from coal without releasing CO2 emissions. These industrial systems are required to the CO2 compression technologies and CO2 consumer for using produced CO2. On the other hand, integrated gasification polygeneration (IG-PG) processes have simultaneous CO2 consumption for valuable products production and electricity production units. In this chapter, the simple IGCC process is compared to the integrated gasification Fischer–Tropsch (IG-FT) process. There are several low-efficiency (or modifiable) units in IGCC and IG-FT processes that can be improved for short, middle, and large times that can increase the overall efficiency of their current configuration. Overall plant availability of 75%, 80%, 85%, and 90% has been reported for current, short, mid, and large time configurations, respectively. Studies have shown that the addition of a carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) process to the IGCC and IG-FT processes can decrease the overall efficiency. Finally, it has been reported that overall production costs can be reduced by more than 30% through the development of current processes to the long-time configuration.

Membrane reactors technology has increasingly grown in popularity and attracted attention. Membrane bioreactors (MBRs) have become serious competitors to other methods for cleaning water. This is a new technology that is expensive but is complicated to operate. The choice of such a technology requires a consideration of all of its advantages and disadvantages. Customers are able to choose among different varieties of configurations of MBRs. A smart choice may provide economic efficiency based on an economic investigation of MBRs and their different designs. This study provides an economic assessment of MBRs.

In this novel conceptual fuel cell vehicle (FCV), an on-board CH4 steam reforming (MSR) membrane reformer (MR) is considered to generate pure H2 for supplying a Fuel Cell (FC) system, as an alternative to the conventional automobile engines. Two on-board tanks are forecast to store CH4 and water, useful for feeding both a combustion chamber (designed to provide the heat required by the system) and a multi tubes Pd-Ag MR useful to generate pure H2 via methane steam reforming (MSR) reaction. The pure H2 stream is hence supplied to the FC. The flue gas stream coming out from the combustion chamber is used to preheat the MR feed stream by two heat exchangers and one evaporator. Then, this theoretical work demonstrates by a 1-D model the feasibility of the MR based system in order to generate 5 kg/day of pure H2 required by the FC system for cruising a vehicle for around 500 km. The calculated CH4 and water consumptions were 50 and 70 kg, respectively, per 1 kg of pure H2. The on-board MR based FCV presents lower CO2 emission rates than a conventional gasoline-powered vehicle, also resulting in a more environmentally friendly solution.

The world population growth leads to important problems and challenges like drinking water demand, climate change, and health problems related to these issues. But the main solution is to find new ways and technologies to ensure world water requirement and produce minimum polluted waters. With regard to conventional treatment methods, engineers offer advanced methods for wastewater and water treatment based on their conventional backgrounds. In this study, membrane-based treatment methods for wastewater and water treatment and their recent advances have been discussed. Methods like microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF), and reverse osmosis (RO) have been investigated, but the main study is about NF and RO systems and their challenges. The present study is based on European and American countries' wastewater and water treatment in which the issues of materials engineering and process design are discussed. There are some important factors in NF and RO process design that are not limited just in module and material of membrane, like feed treatment that can directly effect on costs and membrane performance, which are discussed strongly in this study. The issues that are more important economically and from the engineering point of view such as fouling, fouling controlling strategies, pretreatment, membrane monitoring, and the effect of configuration have been discussed in this study, and finally the finding of the membrane fouling reason and its appropriate pretreatment method is reported as the main parameter.

The Available Soil Water Capacity (AWC) is standard data in most soil databases and expresses soil water contents in the rootzone between field capacity (FC;-33 kPa) and permanent wilting point (WP; -1500 kPa). Literature suggests that increasing the content of soil organic matter (SOM) of a given soil does not significantly increase AWC and this has important implications when estimating soil moisture supply to crops and evaluating the potential for climate mitigation. For most crops, the real FC values vary between -10 and -50 kPa in different soils and WP values between -800 and -1500 kPa. Thus standard values for AWC of FC and WP do not represent field conditions in many soils. When exploring AWC for six Italian soil series, ranging from clay to sandy, AWC values at increasing %SOM were lower in clay soils and higher in sand as compared with actual conditions, which could be explained by considering the shape of the corresponding moisture retention curves. Rather than focus on static AWC values to define moisture supply to plants, real or actual soil moisture supply capacities (MSC) can be obtained by dynamic modeling of the soil-water-atmosphere-plant system, including a “sink-term” indicating a continuous relation between water uptake and negative pressure head of soil water and evaporative demand. Also, only models allow exploration of the effects of future severe IPCC climate scenario RCP 8.5. Thus, studying MSC for the six Italian soil series showed that MSC values were: (i) on average 30% higher than the corresponding AWC; (ii) distinctly different for the six soils; (iii) affected by declines of 1-9% as a result of the effects of future climate scenarios.; (iv) not significantly affected by increases of %SOM when considering climate change, except for the sand. Generalizations as to the effect of future climate scenarios and %SOM on MSC can only be realistic when modeling is performed for soil series in different climate zones. The contribution has been published in Geoderma journal by Bonfante A., Basile A., and Bouma J. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2019.114079).

Today, the integration of membrane reactors with low-temperature fuel cells for power production is one of the pathways toward sustainable development and green power production. This chapter analyzes the advantages/disadvantages of membrane reactors compared to conventional systems, paying special attention to the role of inorganic membranes—particularly, to Pd- and/or Pd-alloy-based membranes—due to their special characteristics of high H2 perm-selectivity with respect to all other gases. This particular behavior is necessary to ensure highly concentrated H2 streams under specific purity requirements of low-temperature polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells.

SIRR-MOD is a DSS integrating two numerical modules: (1) A agro-hydrological model (named FLOWS-HAGES) for simulating flow of water and solutes in heterogeneous agri-environmental systems; (2) A model for simulating the hydraulics of the irrigation network (named COPAM). FLOW-HAGES provides a daily list of hydrants opening based on water or crop criteria. Then, an optimal sequence of hydrants may be established by passing the volumes to be delivered to a model (COPAM) for simulating the hydraulics of the irrigation network, in order to guarantee that the discharges flowing inside the distribution pipes network are delivered under optimal pressure head distribution. In this paper, we only illustrated the potential of FLOWS-HAGES model in simulating the daily evolution of: soil water contents and pressure heads in the soil profile; water uptake; stress periods for each crop; return fluxes to the groundwater under pressurized irrigation systems and climatic conditions at district level. This methodology has been applied to establish irrigation scheduling over the irrigation season for sector 6 of the Irrigation District 10 in the “Sinistra Ofanto” irrigation system. Irrigation water volumes calculated by FLOWS-HAGES model were compared to the volumes delivered by farmers, showing irrigation simulated by the model more frequent than those supplied by the farmers and with lower irrigation volumes.

In this work, the performance of an industrial dense Pd Ag membrane reformer for hydrogen production with methane mixed reforming reaction was evaluated. The rate parameters of mixed reforming reaction on a Ni based catalyst optimized by using the experimental results. One-dimensional models have been considered to model the steam reforming industrial membrane reformer (SRIMR) and mixed reforming industrial membrane reformer (MRIMR). The models are validated by experimental data. The proficiency of MRIMR and SRIMR at similar conditions used as a basis of comparison in terms of temperature, methane conversion, hydrogen yield, syngas production rate and CO2 flow rate. Results revealed that the methane conversion, hydrogen yield and syngas production rate in MRIMR is considerably higher than SRIMR. Furthermore, the operation temperature of MRIMR could be 195 °C lower than that for SRIMR. This would contribute to a major decrease in process costs as well as a reduction in catalyst sintering. On the other hand, although MRIMR consumes CO2, the exited CO2 flow rate at the SRIMR is three times more than that of at the MRIMR, which is a main advantage of MRIMR from the environmental issues point of view.

The purification of H2-rich streams using membranes represents an important separation process, particularly important in the viewpoint of pre-combustion CO2 capture. In this study, the separation of H2 from a mixture containing H2 and CO2 using a zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF)-8 membrane is proposed from a theoretical point of view. For this purpose, the adsorption and diffusion coefficients of H2 and CO2 were considered by molecular simulation. The adsorption of these gases followed the Langmuir model, and the diffusion coefficient of H2 was much higher than that of CO2. Then, using the Maxwell&ndash, Stefan model, the H2 and CO2 permeances and H2/CO2 permselectivities in the H2&ndash, CO2 mixtures were evaluated. Despite the fact that adsorption of CO2 was higher than H2, owing to the simultaneous interference of adsorption and diffusion processes in the membrane, H2 permeation was more pronounced than CO2. The modeling results showed that, for a ZIF-8 membrane, the H2/CO2 permselectivity for the H2&ndash, CO2 binary mixture 80/20 ranges between 28 and 32 at ambient temperature.

In recent years, biomass has been introduced as a promising solution for environmental crisis. Biomass steam gasification is a valuable process for hydrogen production. Main problem of this process is low conversion and low partial pressure of hydrogen in product stream. Pd Ag membrane reactor (MR) can be used in biomass steam gasification to improve the process efficiency. Hence, Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) method was used in this study for a detail modeling and analyzing the biomass steam gasification in a two-dimensional Pd Ag MR. After good agreement of CFD model results with literature experimental data, simulation results was indicated that the Pd Ag MR has better efficiency compared with traditional reactor (TR). Biomass conversion of near 100%, CO selectivity in the range 0–14 and H2 recovery of 70% in the best condition were achieved. In addition, different flow patterns (cocurrent and counter-current modules) were compared for MR and overall efficiency (biomass conversion) of counter-current model was obtained higher than co-current model. In summary, for all operating conditions and modules, Pd Ag MR was showed better efficiency compared with TR.

In the present work, an artificial neural networks (ANNs) model has been developed for investigation of glycerol steam reforming (GSR) process with Pd Ag membrane reactor (MR) in the presence of Co/Al2O3 catalyst. Reaction pressure and sweep factor as independent variables (Inputs) and glycerol conversion, hydrogen recovery, hydrogen yield, H2 selectivity, CO selectivity and CO2 selectivity as dependent variables (outputs) are chosen for ANN modeling of GSR. The ANN model was developed by feed-forward back propagation network with trainlm algorithm and topology (2: 10: 6) and Sigmoid transfer function for hidden and output layers. A good agreement between predicted values using ANN with experimental results was observed (R2 and MSE values were 0.9998 and 3.48 × 10−6 (based on normalized data), respectively). Modeling results indicated that all selected factors (reaction pressure and sweep factor) were effective on output variables. It was found that the reaction pressure with a relative importance of 59% was the most effective parameter in the GSR process with Pd Ag MR in the presence of Co/Al2O3 catalyst.

There is a general agreement about the consideration that the fossil fuels are a limited resource and the emission of carbon dioxide and other harmful products are the main cause of the global warming and climate change. The interest for decreasing the fossil fuels dependence and reducing the greenhouse gases emissions represents a top priority. The biomass is a renewable resource useful for biodiesel and bioethanol production. The latter, most plentiful, is currently considered as green ethanol produced from biomass by biological processes. Meanwhile, membrane reactors represent an innovative and intensified technology for the production and the simultaneous recovery of high-grade hydrogen in only one stage. Here, we describe an efficient medium-temperature (T = 400 °C) bioethanol steam reforming process in a thin (∼5 μm of metallic layer) supported Pd-based membrane reactor packed with a not commercial Co(10%)Pt (3%)/CeO2-ZrO2-Al2O3 bi-metallic catalyst at space velocity between 1900 h−1 and 4800 h−1 and reaction pressure between 1.5 and 2.0 bar. A real bioethanol mixture coming from industry is supplied to the membrane reactor for producing high grade hydrogen, reaching 60% of ethanol conversion (versus ∼ 40% of the equivalent conventional reactor) at 400 °C, 2.0 bar and 1900 h−1, meanwhile recovering almost 70% of the hydrogen produced during the bioethanol steam reforming reaction with a purity higher than 99%. This would make the delivery of hydrogen for PEM fuel cells supplying – and hence the use of green bioethanol as a practical hydrogen carrier – feasible.

In this work, a synthetic mixture of natural gas is considered in a steam reforming process for generating hydrogen by using a membrane reactor housing a composite membrane constituted of a Pd-layer (13 μm) supported on alumina. The Pd/Al2O3 membrane separates part of the produced hydrogen through its selective permeation, although it shows a relatively low H2/N2 ideal selectivity (>200 at 0.5 bar of trans-membrane pressure and T = 425 °C). The steam reforming reaction is performed at 420 °C, by varying the gas hourly space velocity between 4400 h−1 and 6900 h−1 and by using two different mixtures containing some common impurities found within natural gas pipeline. Specifically, the effect of N2 and CO2 as impurities in the feed line is analyzed. The reaction pressure and steam-to-carbon ratio (S/C) are kept constant at 3.0 bar (abs.) and 3.5/1, respectively. The best performance of the Pd-based membrane reactor is obtained at 420 °C, 3.0 bar and 100 mL/min of sweep-gas, yielding a methane conversion of 55% and hydrogen recovery >90%.

The world of viticulture connected to wine making has become a very important activity in many inland areas permitting both the generation of important income and the sustaining of agriculture systems. Recent progress in both crop modeling and Decision Support Systems (DSS) applied to viticulture promises important changes that combine both high quality production and environmental sustainability. However, most of this progress is only addressed at the farm level and does not challenge the viticulture landscape, which is a key issue when facing DOC, DOCG areas, wine growers' cooperatives and consortiums and strategic viticulture planning. Thus, this paper aims to demonstrate that a new type of DSS, which is developed on a Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure (GCI) platform, may provide an important web-based operational tool for high quality viticulture as it connects farm and landscape levels better. The GCI platform supports acquisition, management, processing of both static and dynamic data (e.g. pedological, daily climatic, and vineyard distribution), data visualization, and on-the-fly computer applications in order to perform simulation modeling (e.g. grapevine water stress, evaluation of ecosystem services, etc.). These are all potentially accessible via the Web. This is possible thanks to the implementation of a set of modeling clusters that is strongly rooted in soil-plant-atmosphere and physically based simulation modeling. The DSS tool, applied to an area of 20,000 ha in Southern Italy, is designed to address viticulture planning and management by providing operational support for farmers, farmer associations and decision makers involved in the viticulture landscape. Output of the system includes viticulture planning and management scenario analysis, maps and evaluation of potential and current plant water stress. The tool will also be demonstrated through a short selection of practical case studies.