Hydrology of saline grasslands in the polders of “De Schelde”

For economic reasons, the Flemish government and the Antwerp port authorities are enlarging the Harbour of Antwerp. Therefore, they create new docks and industrial sites in the polders of “Het Waasland”, situated on the left bank of the Schelde - in front of Antwerp. Two decades earlier however, the Flemish government protected important parts of these polders by assigning them the status of Special Protection Area (SPA) under the EU Bird directive. In such cases, the Bird directive demands compensation measures for the loss of protected bird habitats. Among these protected habitats are the very rare saline grasslands. Because these grasslands need very specific hydrological and ecological conditions to develop, it isn’t possible to create them wherever we want to do. To find possible sites for the re-creation of these saline grasslands, we carried out a detailed study of the hydrology, geomorphology and ecology of the “Waaslandpolders”. The results indicate that the saline conditions originate from discharging groundwater passing through a saline peat layer. These conditions are related to the deposits of coarse grain soils, situated at the landside of dikes near former creeks. In the polders of “Het Waasland”, three other parts have the same origin and lie outside the future extents of the harbour. Only in one of them, we found the same special hydrological conditions present in the existing grasslands. The presence of these conditions says nothing about the occurrence of saline vegetation in the future. Therefore, we now study the development of saline grasslands

Investigation on the Possibility of Matching Vulnerability Assessment with Field Observations for Real Structures

Assessment of exiting structures is a challenging issue that is of increasing importance in the last decades. There are, however, a number of uncertainties, which may result in unrealistic estimations of the expected demand. It is widely accepted, for example, that the uncertainties in defining the seismic loads may be one of the main reasons of non-accurate estimations of the structural response. The misprediction of the overall response may however be significantly affected also by the use of different techniques and approaches in calculation of the expected demand on the structure. This paper is focused on two real case study structures that were built in the highly influenced areas from the 1999 earthquake of Kocaeli. The characteristics of the structures, as well as the field measurements allowed the authors to work on the structures in detail and calibrate their model and findings of the analyses and assessment. The assessment approach given in the latest version of the Turkish Earthquake Code (TEC) of 2007 has been adopted to approximate the structural demand as well as the observed structural damage distribution. Results of the structural analyses based on TEC and those of the structural identification have been combined to assess the building performances, paying special attention to the possibility of matching the assessment results with the observed field data. There exist inconsistencies between the reality and the estimations, the possible reasons of which will also be discussed at the end of the paper

Multiple-model based update of belgian reference road data

This paper describes a semi-automatic system for road update based on high resolution orthophotos and 3D surface models. Potential update regions are identified by an object-wise verification of all existing database records, followed by a scene-wide detection of redevelopment regions. The proposed system combines several road detection and road verification approaches from current literature to form a more general solution. Each road detection / verification approach is realized as an independent module representing a unique road model combined with a corresponding processing strategy. The object-wise verification result of each module is formulated as a binary decision between the classes "correct road" and "incorrect road". These individual decisions are combined by Dempster-Shafer fusion, which provides tools for dealing with uncertain and incomplete knowledge about the statistical properties of the data. For each road detection / verification module a confidence function for the result is introduced that reflects the degree of correspondence of an actual test situation with an optimal situation according to the underlying road model of that module. Experimental results achieved with data from the national Belgian road database in a test site of about 134 km(2) demonstrate the potential of the method

Strategies for introducing methanol as an alternative fuel for shipping

Although waterborne transport is an energy efficient means of transport, its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is growing and pollutant emissions are high relative to other forms of transport. Emission legislation on the other hand is catching up by introducing strongly reduced emission limits in the upcoming years, which leads to an urgent need for alternative ways of fueling waterborne transport. In the Horizon 2020 “LeanShips” project, the use of methanol as an alternative fuel for shipping is studied in one of its demonstrators. In the demonstrator, a high speed marine diesel engine is converted for methanol use. This paper discusses the rationale for methanol as an alternative fuel for marine transportation, different possible strategies for operating vessel engines on methanol, their pros and cons, and the approach taken within LeanShips, namely dual fuel operation with methanol port injection. The potential of methanol concerning energy efficiency and pollutant emissions is discussed, as well as other demonstration projects on methanol and next steps for methanol engine developments

Entropy as Noether charge for quasistatic gradient flow

Entropy increase is fundamentally related to the breaking of time-reversal symmetry. By adding the 'extra dimension' associated with thermodynamic forces, we extend that discrete symmetry to a continuous symmetry for the dynamical fluctuations around (nonlinear) gradient flow. The latter connects macroscopic equilibrium conditions upon introducing a quasistatic protocol of control parameters. The entropy state function becomes the Noether charge. As a result, and following ideas expressed by Shin-ichi Sasa and co-workers, the adiabatic invariance of the entropy, part of the Clausius heat theorem, gets connected with the Noether theorem.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figur

A Higher Form of Hermeneutics?: The Digital Humanities in Political Historiography

Rens Bod’s optimism with regard to digital research tools also seems to be justified for the field of political history. In particular, these tools will enable us to ask questions that were hitherto unthinkable, and try to answer them on an unenvisaged scale. Unlike that which Bod suggests, however, this development will not bring us closer to revealing some alleged universal patterns in history and therefore herald a new era of Positivism.   On the contrary, the digital research tools will show us manifold differences, both diachronic and synchronic, in the way (groups of) political actors identified themselves and gave meaning to the world surrounding them. Moreover, they will enable us to relate these differences to a broad range of social variables. If we really want to test the validity of these relationships however, we will have to actually interpret the texts and read them hermeneutically in their precise historical contexts.   This article is part of the forum 'The End of the Humanities 1.0'