Recovery of Plant Nutrients from Dilute Solutions of Human Urine and Preliminary Investigations on Pot Trials

Within the context of Ecological Sanitation (ECOSAN), human urine has been the subject of research and practice as a potential fertilizer in the recent years. Although quite a lot had been done with original undiluted urine with promising outcomes, not much appears in the literature which concentrates on dilute solutions of urine. This is important because unless waterless toilets are employed, urine will be diluted with flush water in actual use. In this work, dilute solutions of urine are investigated with emphasis on the recovery of plant nutrients. A natural zeolite namely clinoptilolite was loaded with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium as an indirect route of processing urine. The results have revealed that hydrolysis is completed in shorter times in dilute samples. Clinoptilolite could successfully remove plant nutrients from all dilute solutions. Nitrogen could be recovered up to 86% with higher efficiencies at higher concentrations in general. Recovery of orthophosphates increases with increasing concentration to reach 96%, however, potassium could not be recovered. The preliminary experiments with grass have revealed that nutrient loaded clinoptilolite was as effective as chemical fertilizers while direct application of original and diluted solutions of urine had shown inferior yields.     

Combination of historical maps and satellite images of the Banat region—Re-appearance of an old wetland area

The area of Banat, a historical region shared by Romania and Serbia, has been hit by a centennial flood event in spring 2005. The Temes (Tamiš/Timiş) River flooded several hundred km², with many settlements. The extent of the flood was partly unexpected, especially in positional sense. In order to achieve a better understanding of the phenomenon, we analysed the SRTM digital elevation model as well as historical maps. Several historical maps, dating back to the 16th century, indicate marshland or even a large lake in the area, not existing today but almost exactly coinciding with the extent of the 2005 flood.The historical and archive maps document the water regulation measures taken since the early 19th century. The actual flood is found to be a sort of a restoration of the original natural conditions. Via the analysis of the DEM and historical maps the unexpected extent of the flood scenario can be explained and understood. We suggest that an analysis of historical and archive maps, combined (geo-referenced) with high-resolution DEMS in other flood-endangered areas, should be used in order to be better prepared for decadal or centennial flood events induced by climatic change.     

The Bathymetric Stripping Corrections to Gravity Field Quantities for a Depth-Dependent Model of Seawater Density

In geophysical studies investigating the lithosphere structure, topographic, bathymetric, and density contrasts stripping corrections are applied to gravity data. The ocean density contrast is typically calculated as the difference between the mean densities of crust and seawater. The approximation of the actual seawater density by its mean value yields relative errors up to 2%. To reduce these errors, we adopt a depth-dependent seawater density model to account for increasing density with pressure/depth. This approximation reduces errors to less than 0.1%. This density model is utilized in newly derived expressions for the bathymetric stripping corrections.     

Determination of the reference symmetry axis of a generally anisotropic medium which is approximately transversely isotropic

For a given stiffness tensor (tensor of elastic moduli) of a generally anisotropic medium, we estimate to what extent the medium is transversely isotropic (uniaxial) and determine the direction of its reference symmetry axis expressed in terms of the unit reference symmetry vector. If the medium is exactly transversely isotropic (exactly uniaxial), we obtain the direction of its symmetry axis. We can also calculate the first–order and second–order spatial derivatives of the reference symmetry vector which may be useful in tracing the reference rays for the coupling ray theory. The proposed method is tested using various transversely isotropic (uniaxial) and approximately transversely isotropic (approximately uniaxial) media.     

Reference database for seismic ground-motion in Europe (RESORCE)

This paper presents the overall procedure followed in order to assemble the most recent pan-European strong-motion databank: Reference Database for Seismic Ground-Motion in Europe (RESORCE). RESORCE is one of the products of the SeIsmic Ground Motion Assessment (SIGMA; projet-sigma.com) project. RESORCE is intended to be a single integrated accelerometric databank for Europe and surrounding areas for use in the development and testing of ground-motion models and for other engineering seismology and earthquake engineering applications. RESORCE aims to contribute to the improvement of earthquake risk studies in Europe and surrounding areas. RESORCE principally updates and extends the previous pan-European strong-motion databank (Ambraseys et al. in Bollettino di Geofisica Teorica ed Applicata 45:113–129, 2004a) with recently compiled Greek, Italian, Swiss and Turkish accelerometric archives. The updates also include earthquake-specific studies published in recent years. The current content of RESORCE includes 5,882 multi-component and uniformly processed accelerograms from 1,814 events and 1,540 strong-motion stations. The moment magnitude range covered by RESORCE is $2.8 \le \hbox {M}_{\mathrm{w}} \le 7.8$ . The source-to-site distance interval extends to 587 km and distance information is given by the common point- and extended-source distance measures. The paper presents the current features of RESORCE through simple statistics that also quantify the differences in metadata and strong-motion processing with respect to the previous version of the pan-European strong-motion databank.     

1-D DC Resistivity Modeling and Interpretation in Anisotropic Media Using Particle Swarm Optimization

We examine the one-dimensional direct current method in anisotropic earth formation. We derive an analytic expression of a simple, two-layered anisotropic earth model. Further, we also consider a horizontally layered anisotropic earth response with respect to the digital filter method, which yields a quasi-analytic solution over anisotropic media. These analytic and quasi-analytic solutions are useful tests for numerical codes. A two-dimensional finite difference earth model in anisotropic media is presented in order to generate a synthetic data set for a simple one-dimensional earth. Further, we propose a particle swarm optimization method for estimating the model parameters of a layered anisotropic earth model such as horizontal and vertical resistivities, and thickness. The particle swarm optimization is a naturally inspired meta-heuristic algorithm. The proposed method finds model parameters quite successfully based on synthetic and field data. However, adding 5 % Gaussian noise to the synthetic data increases the ambiguity of the value of the model parameters. For this reason, the results should be controlled by a number of statistical tests. In this study, we use probability density function within 95 % confidence interval, parameter variation of each iteration and frequency distribution of the model parameters to reduce the ambiguity. The result is promising and the proposed method can be used for evaluating one-dimensional direct current data in anisotropic media.     

Inversion of Self Potential Anomalies with Multilayer Perceptron Neural Networks

This study investigates the inverse solution on a buried and polarized sphere-shaped body using the self-potential method via multilayer perceptron neural networks (MLPNN). The polarization angle (α), depth to the centre of sphere (h), electrical dipole moment (K) and the zero distance from the origin (x ₀) were estimated. For testing the success of the MLPNN for sphere model, parameters were also estimated by the traditional Damped Least Squares (Levenberg–Marquardt) inversion technique (DLS). The MLPNN was first tested on a synthetic example. The performance of method was also tested for two S/N ratios (5 % and 10 %) by adding noise to the same synthetic data, the estimated model parameters with MLPNN and DLS method are satisfactory. The MLPNN also applied for the field data example in ?zmir, Urla district, Turkey, with two cross-section data evaluated by MLPNN and DLS, and the two methods showed good agreement.