Wet Biomass Treatment: Energy and Sanitation System Concepts

The global market for the wastewater treatment industry has been compelled to devise new concepts due to several factors. Currently, approximately 80% of untreated wastewater is discharged worldwide. The conventional technology for municipal solid waste treatment, which has been in use for over a century, is only partially effective in terms of...

Rotating heat pipe assisted annealing

Steel is an indispensable material for the sustainable maintenance and progress of modern civilization. Its versatility in terms of mechanical and thermal characteristics, corrosion resistance, raw material availability, energy consumption and recyclability provides a clear advantage in a fast-changing technological landscape. In order to adapt...

Energy-aware noise reduction for wireless acoustic sensor networks

In speech processing applications, e.g., speech recognition, hearing aids (HAs), video conferencing, and human-computer interaction, speech enhancement or noise reduction is an essential front-end task, as the recorded speech signals are inevitably corrupted by interference, including coherent/incoherent noise and reverberation. Traditional...

Adaptive thermal comfort opportunities for dwellings: Providing thermal comfort only when and where needed in dwellings in the Netherlands

<br/>

Control and Coordination for Automated Container Terminals

For enhancing the performance of automated container terminals, this PhD thesis focuses on improving energy efficiency and implementing more autonomous equipment (e.g., free-ranging AGVs) at the operational level. On the one hand, due to the increased energy price and environmental stress, energy efficiency needs to be improved. On the other...

Metal-Organic Frameworks For Adsorption Driven Energy Transformation: From Fundamentals To Applications

A novel class of materials, i.e. Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), has successfully been developed that is extremely suited for application in heat pumps and chillers. They have a superior performance over commercial sorbents and may potentially contribute to considerable energy savings worldwide. Globally about 33 % of the energy consumption is...

Dwelling on Courtyards: Exploring the energy efficiency and comfort potential of courtyards for dwellings in the Netherlands

The urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon and the dependency of buildings on fossil fuels were the two main issues that formed this dissertation. UHI results in higher air temperatures in dense urban areas compared with their suburbs and rural surroundings. This phenomenon affects human health through thermal discomfort and air pollution....

Advanced Wireless Local Area Networks in the Unlicensed Sub-1GHz ISM-bands

This dissertation addresses the challenges of wireless local area networks (WLANs) that operate in the unlicensed sub-1GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band. Frequencies in the 900MHz spectrum enable a wider coverage due to the longer propagation characteristics of the radio waves. To utilize globally available sub-1GHz (S1G) ISM...

Exergy in the built environment. The added value of exergy in the assessment and development of energy systems for the built environment.

This doctoral research studied the added value of exergy for the assessment and development of energy systems for the built environment, aiming at a reduced need for high-quality energy input. Currently the analysis and development of energy systems for the built environment is based on the energy concept. Energy however gives an incomplete...

Activated sludge filterability and full-scale membrane bioreactor operation

Despite continuous developments in the field of MBR technology, membrane fouling together with the associated energy demand and related costs issues remain major challenges. The efficiency of the filtration process in an MBR is governed by the activated sludge filterability, which is still limitedly understood and is determined by the...

Development and evaluation of ultra high pressure waterjet cutting

Abrasive waterjet (AWJ) cutting is a machining process to cut wide range of materials from soft materials such as rubber, leather to hard materials such as metals by means of a high-velocity slurry jet, formed as a result of injecting abrasive particles into a waterjet. The machining action is the result of these particles impacting against a...

Policies for improving energy efficiency in the European housing stock

According to EC forecasts, if energy efficiency could be increased 1% annually until 2010, two-thirds of the potential energy saving in the EU could be achieved. This would comply with 40% of the EU's Kyoto obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8% on the 1990 level by 2010-12, by cutting 200 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year....

Power Management for Portable Devices