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The Third Sector Institutions have acquired an important role on the society through the years, with new demands that have been given to them in financial and human terms. Manny studies were made under the sustainability of PISS (Private Institutions of Social Solidarity). However, this study is going to be focused on Cerebral Palsy PISS’s, where economic and financial problems still persist. Also, this is a very sensible area of the society where resources are scarce due to the lack of economic and financial support. The main objective of this study is to determine which factors may put in cause the sustainability of the PISS’s. Several methods were utilized to determine the statistics of our analysis. Those are, the quantitative method, a series of questionnaires and the analysis of multiple data that was available to us. In this study we also pretend to verify which factors may lead to the loss of sustainability of this Institutions, the risks zones they face, in the area of Cerebral Palsy. These areas are their own indebtedness, the marking of possible areas on where value can be generated, the formulation of possible suggestions, and the prioritization of transformation programs. In general, the factors that have contributed to the economic vulnerability of this PISS’s are according with the respondents, and in the majority of the cases, related with their own management and their economic and financial aspects. Also, with this study, we pretend to innovate, creating guidelines and limiting sustainability risk zones. These guidelines aim to serve in the future, several PISS managers and technicians, with the intent of detecting this referred symptom’s, which may lead these Institutions to an economic default and also to a state of bankruptcy. Due to the fact of these Institutions being highly dependent from Public State economic support, is required from their leader’s several innovative measures, as much in human and technical terms, measures which allow them to be self-sustainable and at the same time permitting these agents to be important in the social intervention, with significant impact on the underprivileged populations. As Instituições do Terceiro Setor têm vindo a adquirir um importante papel na Sociedade ao longo dos tempos, com novas exigências lhe são impostas, tanto em recursos humanos como financeiros. Muitos estudos se têm vindo a realizar no âmbito da Sustentabilidade das IPSS. No entanto, este irá abranger o Setor das IPSS de Paralisia Cerebral, Instituições onde os problemas económico-financeiros são determinantes, e também por ser um uma das áreas mais sensíveis da Sociedade, onde os recursos são escassos. O objetivo principal deste estudo é o de saber quais os fatores que poderão pôr em causa a Sustentabilidade das IPSS de Paralisia Cerebral. Para isso utilizou-se o método quantitativo, através de um questionário por Inquérito e pela análise dos Balanços e das Demonstrações de Resultados, por forma a completar, em termos estatísticos, a nossa análise. Da interpretação desses resultados pretende-se determinar quais os fatores da perda da Sustentabilidade destas IPSS, quais as zonas de risco que enfrentam, nomeadamente o endividamento, identificar as áreas passíveis para a Criação de Valor, formular possíveis recomendações e priorizar iniciativas para a implementação de um programa de transformação. Os fatores que de uma maneira geral que contribuíram para a vulnerabilidade financeira destas IPSS segundo os participantes inquiridos, estão na grande maioria dos casos, relacionados com sintomas relativos com a parte económico-financeira e de gestão. Com este estudo, também se procurou inovar, criando um quadro orientador e limitador das zonas de risco de perda de sustentabilidade, mapa esse que poderá servir no futuro aos gestores e técnicos das IPSS, para detetarem o aparecimento de tais sintomas, os quais podem levar as Instituições a situações de incumprimento e eventualmente a um estado de falência. A situação de subsídio dependência em relação ao Estado, requer por parte dos dirigentes a adoção de novas medidas inovadoras, quer em termos técnicos quer humanos, que lhes permitam serem autossustentáveis, continuando a serem agentes importantes na intervenção social, com impacto significativo junto das populações mais desfavorecidas. Orientação: Felipa Cristina Henriques Rodrigues Lopes dos Reis

This study proposes and evaluates a predictive control model for the management of the power flow in a hybrid microgeneration power plant with additional storage capacity. The plant integrates a photovoltaic array, a wind turbine, a diesel generator, and a lithium ion battery bank. One objective of the proposed predictive control model is to maximise the use of power from renewable resources looking for the weather predictions and thus minimise the use of fossil power from the diesel generator and corresponding CO2 emissions. Another aim is to maximise the duration of lithium ion batteries, since extending their lifetime is crucial for the system's economic viability, and since battery disposal brings environmental concerns as well. A numerical evaluation is performed about the evolution of power dispatch decisions and of the batteries state of charge, depending on the available power storage capacity. Model predictive control proves to be a suitable strategy in this system.

The combination of hydrothermal pretreatment followed by delignification with imidazole was evaluated for the first time as a potential selective two-stage fractionation for elephant grass, aiming at obtaining pure fractions susceptible to conversion to high value-added products. In addition, the recovery of cellulose and hemicelluloses and enzymatic hydrolysis yield of pretreated elephant grass were evaluated. Hydrothermal pretreatment at 180 °C under non-isothermal conditions allowed obtaining a liquor rich mainly in xylo- and glucooligosaccharides, as well as pentoses. Subsequent treatment of the recovered solid fraction with imidazole at 140 °C for 182.5 min resulted in 83.8 wt% delignification and cellulose enrichment of 97.7 wt%. The solids obtained from the two-stage pretreatment process also permitted high glucan to glucose conversion through enzymatic hydrolysis using Cellic CTec2 (99.0 mol%) or an enzymatic complex of Penicillium echinulatum (96.3 mol%).

The paper discusses a case study of the Trás-os-Montes region to assess the resilience and sustainability of the local sheep sector. The area is a low-density mountainous region where small ruminant production is a relevant sector of the economy and is mainly based on natural resources. The study employed a mixed methodological approach to identify the socio-economic profile of different actors and the main obstacles and opportunities of this livestock activity. The research found that the main strength of the sector is the intrinsic quality of the products with origin in the various indigenous sheep breeds. However, marketing channels associated with this mechanism are generally limited, and its market shares are minimal. The analysis highlights the constraints resulting from the holdings’ small average size, the advanced age of most farmers, the lack of successors, the low profitability of the lamb meat, and producers’ weak bargaining power. Also, wool's lack of economic interest is an economic and environmental problem for farmers. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This paper presents the goals and components of a quantitative energy balance assessment framework to define PEDs flexibly in three important contexts: the context of the district's density and RES potential, the context of a district's location, induced mobility and the context of the dis-trict's future environment and its decarbonized energy demand or supply. It starts by introducing the practical goals of this definition approach: achievable, yet sufficiently ambitious to be inline with Paris 2050 for most urban and rural Austrian district typologies. It goes on to identify the main design parts of the definition: system boundaries, balancing weights and balance targets and argue how they can be linked to the definition goals in detail. In particular we specify three levels of system boundaries and argue their individual necessity: operation, including everyday mobili-ty, including embodied energy and emissions. It argues that all three pillars of PEDs, energy effi-ciency, onsite renewables and energy flexibility can be assessed with the single metric of a prima-ry energy balance when using carefully designed, time-dependent conversion factors. Finally, it is discussed how balance targets can be interpreted as information and requirements from the sur-rounding energy system, which we identify as a "context factor". Three examples of such context factors, each corresponding to the balance target of one of the previously defined system bounda-ries operation, mobility and embodied emissions are presented: Density (as a context of opera-tion), sectoral energy balances and location (as a context for mobility) and an outlook of a person-al emission budgets (as a context for embodied emissions). Finally, the proposed definition framework is applied to seven distinct district typologies in Austria and discussed in terms of its design goals.

The smart grid is a fully automatic delivery grid for electricity power with a two-way reliable flow of electricity and information among different equipment on the grid. Smart meters and sensors monitoring the system provide a huge amount of data in various part of smart grid. To logically manage this trouble, a new lossy data compression approach for big data compression is proposed. The optimal singular value decomposition (SVD) is applied to a matrix that achieves the optimal number of singular values to the sending process, and the other ones will be neglected. This goal is done due to the quality of retrieved data and the compression ratio. In the presented scheme, to implement the optimization framework, various intelligent optimization methods are used to determine the number of optimal values in the elimination stage. The efficiency and capabilities of the proposed method are examined using a wide range of data types, from electricity market data to image processing benchmarks. The comparisons show that the compression level obtained by the proposed method can dominate the points given by the existing SVD rank reduction methods. Also, as the other finding of this article, the performance of the rank reduction methods depends on the application and data types. It means that a rank reduction method can reveal a good performance in one application and performs unacceptably for another purpose. So, the optimized rank reduction can pave the way toward a robust and reliable performance.

Abstract Energy use strongly contributes to CO 2 emissions. Since low-carbon technologies help reducing those emissions, attention should be addressed to technological knowledge. Therefore, this paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium growth model with endogenous skill-biased technological change to study the contributions of environmental policies in producing more ecological goods. By solving the transitional dynamics, it is shown that when green firms and green research are supported by policy and/or dirty activities are taxed, technological progress leads to more ecological goods production and environmental quality improvements. Furthermore, a positive change in green environmental quality fosters R&D on ecological goods, increasing their production.

Potential wave energy in Indonesia between 5 kW m–1 to 20 kW m–1 depending on-site location coastline. This research in ocean energy of Wave Energy Conversion (WEC) is wave activated body using the floating or motion hull due to kinetic and momentum energy from an ocean wave. The pendulum movement cause by a floating hull to drive the electric generator. The shape of the hull, displacement, and position point of the mooring line greatly influences the movement of the hull. This paper discusses how to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation can solve and determine the best mooring line position in the hull. Moreover, the shape of the hull at under waterline or drought has slope angle 45°, length overall 3 m, breadth 1.5 m, depth 2 m, and draft 0.65 m. One of the boundary conditions in the domain CFD, the direction of a wave from inlet boundary to starboard or port side using regular wave. The position both of mooring bitts are at forwarding perpendicular and after perpendicular. Three-position of mooring bitts that have simulated CFD: under the waterline, (ii) at the waterline, and (iii) up waterline. The result of simulation that the best position of mooring bitts is at the waterline.