Compensation for oil pollution damage caused by oil spills from ships and the international oil pollution compensation fund

Liability and compensation for pollution damage caused by oil spills from laden tankers is governed by two international conventions: the 1969 Civil Liability Convention and the 1971 Fund Convention. The Civil Liability Convention established a system of strict liability for tanker owners and introduced compulsory liability insurance. The Fund Convention created a system of supplementary compensation administered by an intergovernmental organization, the International Oil Pollution Compensation Fund (IOPC Fund), which at present has 56 member states (August 1993). The IOPC Fund pays compensation to victims of oil pollution in member states when the compensation from the shipowner and his insurer is insufficient. Over the years (up to August 1993), the IOPC Fund has been involved in 66 incidents and has paid US$92 million to victims. Only three of these incidents have been taken to court, whereas in all other cases claims have been settled out of court. The IOPC Fund has developed a policy on the admissibility of claims covering clean-up costs, measures to prevent pollution, damage to property and economic loss suffered by fishermen, hotel-owners and others who depend directly for their livelihood on sea-related activities.     

Activity-composition relations of the magnesiowüstite solid solution series in equilibrium with metallic iron in the temperature range 1050–1400 K

The equilibrium $${\text{(1}} - y{\text{)Fe}}_{(s)} + \tfrac{{\text{1}}}{{\text{2}}}{\text{O}}_{{\text{2(g)}}} \rightleftarrows {\text{Fe}}_{{\text{1}} - y} {\text{O}}_{{\text{(}}s,{\text{ in MW)}}} $$ was studied by measuring oxygen potentials for a range of different magnesiowüstite compositions relative to those of the iron-wüstite system in an oxygen concentration cell involving yttria stabilized zirconia as the solid electrolyte. The temperature range covered was 1050 to 1400 K. Separate measurements of the mole fraction of trivalent iron in magnesiowüstite (x(Fe³⁺)) were made and the composition dependence ofx(Fe³⁺) was taken into account in calculations of the activity-composition relations of FeO, Fe_2/3O and MgO.     

Isotopic composition of primary cosmic-ray nitrogen and oxygen with consequences for source models

An experimental investigation of the isotopic composition of cosmic-ray nitrogen and oxygen is reported. The detector is a stack of nuclear emulsions exposed at about 3 g cm^–2 atmospheric depth. The mass determinations are based on photometric track width measurements on stopping nuclei. The standard deviation of the mass measurements is 0.46 AMU for nitrogen and 0.50 AMU for oxygen. The energy of the measured nuclei falls in the interval 220–450 MeV nucleon^–1 at the top of the atmosphere.The measured isotopic quotients have been extrapolated to near interstellar space with standard methods. The extrapolated quotients are¹⁵N/N=0.34±0.10,¹⁷O/O=0.02±0.03,¹⁸O/O=0.07±0.03. The nitrogen quotient extrapolated to the cosmic-ray source shows that the nitrogenoxygen abundance ratio is approximately the same in the source as in the solar system. The result has been compared with different hypotheses about the source composition and is found to be in best agreement with a hypothesis which states that source matter has approximately the composition of the solar system and that a selection mechanism, which depends on the atomic properties of the elements, is working in the source.     

Integration and calibration of a plasticity model for granular materials

A new macroscopic constitutive model for non‐cohesive granular materials, with the focus on coarse‐sized materials (railway ballast), is presented. The model is based on the concepts of rate‐independent isotropic plasticity. The Backward Euler rule is used for integrating the pertinent evolution equations. The resulting incremental relations are solved in the strain space that is extended with the internal (hardening) variables. The model is calibrated using data from Conventional Triaxial Compression (CTC) tests, carried out at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A function evaluation method is used for the optimization, whereby a ‘multi‐vector’ strategy for choosing the appropriate start vector is proposed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.