The primary aim of the study was to develop and validate an in-house upscale of Automatic Methane Potential Test System II for studying real-time inocula and real-scale substrates in batch, codigestion and enzyme enhanced hydrolysis experiments, in addition to semi-continuous operation of the developed equipment and experiments testing inoculum functional quality. The successful upscale to 5 L enabled comparison of different process configurations in shorter preparation times with acceptable accuracy and high-through put intended for industrial decision making. The adoption of the same scales, equipment and methodologies in batch and semi-continuous tests mirroring those at full scale biogas plants resulted in matching methane yields between the two laboratory tests and full-scale, confirming thus the increased decision making value of the approach for industrial operations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3320712
During the last decade, several rainfall-induced deep-seated large landslides with volumes of the order of 1 million m3 were triggered in various locations in Slovenia (central Europe), each representing a serious threat to the nearby villages and traffic infrastructure and urging to be mitigated. The Macesnik landslide, triggered in 1989, and the Slano blato landslide, triggered in 2000, were the first two large landslides in Slovenia, where a combination of drainage and retaining works consisting of deep reinforced concrete (RC) shafts/wells was successfully used as a mitigation measure. This paper presents the field conditions and a brief history of the two landslides with emphasis on the design approach and method used for the stability analysis and the design of deep RC shafts/wells. In addition, the paper gives an insight into the problems associated with the execution of works and provides data about the behavior of the two landslides after drainage and retaining works were completed. The monitoring data show that the undertaken mitigation measures were efficient to improve the stability of both landslides and significantly reduce the risk.
COBISS.SI-ID: 6097761
We develop a library of components for building semi-distributed watershed models. The library incorporates basic modeling knowledge that allows us to adequately model different water fluxes and nutrient loadings on a watershed scale. It is written in a formalism compliant with the equation discovery tool ProBMoT, which can automatically construct watershed models from the components in the library, given a conceptual model specification and measured data. We apply the proposed modeling methodology to the Ribeira da Foupana catchment to extract a set of viable hydrological models. By specifying the conceptual model and using the knowledge library, two different hydrological models are generated. Both models are automatically calibrated against measurements and the model with the lower root mean squared error (RMSE) value is selected as an appropriate hydrological model for the selected study area.
COBISS.SI-ID: 6485601
Several different factors external to the natural hazard of flash flooding can contribute to the type and magnitude of their resulting damages. Human exposure, vulnerability, fatality and injury rates can be minimized by identifying and then mitigating the causative factors for human impacts. A database of flash flooding was used for statistical analysis of human impacts across the U.S. 21,549 flash flood events were analyzed during a 6-year period from October 2006 to 2012. Based on the information available in the database, physical parameters were introduced and then correlated to the reported human impacts. Probability density functions of the frequency of flash flood events and the PDF of occurrences weighted by the number of injuries and fatalities were used to describe the influence of each parameter. The factors that emerged as the most influential on human impacts are short flood durations, small catchment sizes in rural areas, vehicles, and nocturnal events with low visibility. Analyzing and correlating a diverse range of parameters to human impacts give us important insights into what contributes to fatalities and injuries and further raises questions on how to manage them.
COBISS.SI-ID: 6926945
Copula functions are often used for multivariate frequency analyses, but discharge and suspended sediment concentrations have not yet been modelled together with the use of 3- dimensional copula functions. One hydrological station from Slovenia and five stations from USA with watershed areas from 920 km2 to 24,996 km2 were used for trivariate frequency analyses of peak discharges, hydrograph volumes and suspended sediment concentrations. Different parametric marginal distributions were applied and parameters were estimated with the method of L-moments. Maximum pseudo-likelihood method was used for copula parameters estimation.With the use of statistical and graphical tests we selected the most appropriate copula model. Symmetric and asymmetric versions of Archimedean copulas were applied according to the dependence characteristics of the individual stations. We selected Gumbel- Hougaard copula as the most appropriate model for all discussed stations. Primary joint return periods OR and secondary Kendall's return periods were calculated and comparison between selected copula functions was made. We can conclude that copula functions are useful mathematical tool, which can also be used for modelling variables that are presented in this paper.
COBISS.SI-ID: 6578273