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This study aims to evaluate the capability of SO2 to interact with soot and to determine the kinetics of this reaction under conditions of interest for combustion. The conditions of the soot reactivity experiments were: 1% SO2 with nitrogen to balance, around 10 mg of soot, and different reaction temperatures for each run: 1275, 1325, 1375, 1425, and 1475 K. Results demonstrate that SO2 does interact with soot. The evaluation of the soot reactivity has been based on the calculation of the time for the complete conversion of carbon through the employment of the Shrinking Core Model equations for decreasing size particle with chemical reaction control. The reactivity of soot with SO2 increased by a factor of about 3 when increasing the reaction temperature of the test from 1275 K to 1475 K. Kinetics in terms of Arrhenius parameters showed that the activation energy of the interaction of soot with SO2 was around 82 kJ/mol.

The growing interest in sustainable development is reflected in both the market’s sensitivity to environmental and social issues and companies’ interest in the opportunities that sustainable development objectives provide. SMEs, which account for most of the world’s pollution, have significant resource constraints for a sustainable development. Sharing their scarce resources can help them to overcome these constraints and to gain agility and organisational resilience against uncertainties, but the distrust inherent in belonging to different companies prevents them from sharing the necessary information for coordination purposes. This paper presents a coordination mechanism proposal with information asymmetry to allow independent companies’ resources to be sustainably shared as a technological driver. The proposed distributed coordination mechanism is compared to both a decentralised–uncoordinated and a centralised situation. The interest of the proposal is evaluated by a computer simulation experiment employing mathematical programming models with independent objectives in the Generic Materials and Operations Planning formulation with a rolling horizon procedure in different demand, uncertainty and product scenarios. Competitive improvement is identified for all members for their excess capacity use and their operations planning.

One of the factors involved in goat milk production is the role of women as farmers. The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of women on dairy goat farms, considering: (1) the profile of women occupationally involved, (2) the organization of the women’s work, (3) the degree of involvement by women in the decision-making on these farms, and (4) the influence of women’s work on productive results. This study was conducted on 52 dairy goat farms in southern Spain. A descriptive analysis and means comparisons were performed to describe the farms where any women were involved or not. In 61.5% of the farms, at least one woman was involved, with an age of 42.2 ± 8.8 years. Very few women were farm owners, although women took binding decisions in 81.25% of these farms. Their work is dedicated to milking and caring for the kids. Women had a positive influence on the productive variables analysed, and for mastitis in herds, the incidence was lower in herds where women participated (p < 0.01). In conclusion, it is recommended to include women’s work as a factor when characterizing dairy goats farms’ systems to evaluate their positive effect on a farm’s performance.

Abstract Among different techniques for the storage and release of energy, phase change materials hold great promise to satisfy the growing needs of smart thermal energy management and portable thermal energy sectors. However, low thermal conductivity and shape-instability through the phase transition process are two main drawbacks of phase change materials towards industrialization. In this review paper, recent progresses in employing graphene-based nanostructures as a versatile solution for the aforementioned shortcomings are presented in detail. Graphene-based nanostructures, as either graphene nanosheets or graphene-based porous nanostructures, can improve the thermal conductivity of phase change materials and shape stability of these energy storage systems significantly. Moreover, recent studies presented here suggest that graphene-based phase change composites can be considered as promising energy harvesting systems for solar-to-thermal and solar-to-electrical energy conversion and storage applications.

The presented study examines the economic viability and optimization of a previously designed integrated process for producing liquid methanol. The annualized cost of the system method is applied for economic analysis. The optimization method includes a robust hybrid approach that combines the NSGA-II multi-objective optimization algorithm with artificial intelligence. Decision variables for the optimization are taken from a sensitivity analysis to optimize the exergy and energy efficiencies and the investment return period. Decision-making methodologies, including LINMAP, fuzzy, and TOPSIS, are utilized to identify the optimal outcomes, effectively identifying points along the Pareto-optimal front. Compared with the original design, the research outcomes demonstrate an over 38% reduction in the process’s investment return period post optimization, as evaluated through the TOPSIS and LINMAP methodologies. Additionally, the highest level of thermal efficiency achieved through optimization stands at 79.9%, assessed using the LINMAP and TOPSIS methods, and 79.2% using the fuzzy Bellman–Zadeh method. The process optimization in the presented research, coupled with the improved economic feasibility, mitigates energy consumption through maximizing efficiency, thereby fostering sustainable and environmentally friendly development.

Abstract Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have driven the industry of rechargeable batteries in recent years due to their advantages such as high energy and power density and relatively long lifespan. Nevertheless, the dispose of spent LIBs has harmful impacts on the environment which needs to be addressed by recycling LIBs. However, none of the currently developed recycling processes is economical. The physical recycling process of LIBs may be economical if the cathode active materials can be separated, regenerated, and reused to make new LIBs. However, the first barrier for regeneration and reusing is the separation of different types of spent cathode active materials in the filter cake that are mixed with each other and come in the form of very fine powders with various sizes (&lt; 30 μm) from the physical recycling process. The aim of this study is to separate the mixture of cathode active materials by adopting Stokes’ law. The focus will be only on mechanical separation with no thermal or chemical separation methods. For the validation, an experiment was designed and successfully performed where different types of spent cathode materials (e.g., LiCoO2, LiFePO4, and LiMn2O4) were separated from the spent anode materials (e.g., graphite) with high efficiency and reasonable time.