Acid precipitation may increase human exposure to several potentially toxic metals by increasing metal concentrations in major pathways to man, particularly food and water, and in some instances by enhancing the conversion of metal species to more toxic forms. Human exposures to methylmercury are almost entirely by way of consumption of fish and seafood. In some countries, intakes by this route...

This paper estimates costs associated with water pollution in the Olifants River Water Management Area (WMA) in South Africa, and, more specifically, the area represented by the Loskop Dam Water User Association. We focus on the impacts of salinisation on commercial irrigated agriculture, and of microbial pollution on the general population of the WMA, many of whom do not have access to municip...

With the aim of tracking the deteriorating process of a specific individual multi-state system consisting of more than one multi-state component, a dynamic reliability assessment method which can utilize systemlevel observation history to dynamically update the reliability function of multi-state degraded systems is developed in this paper. The current and future state probabilities of componen...

One of the key design parameters to a process plant with large capacity is the risk of AIV (Acoustically Induced Vibration) on the flare piping system. AIV is a piping vibration phenomenon exhibiting high frequencies caused by large acoustic power generated by the pressure drop across a PRV (Pressure Relief Valve). The evaluation method for susceptibility of piping to AIV fatigue failure was fi...

This paper presents cross entropy (CE) based methodology for optimal design of water distribution network (WDN). Design of WDN involves selection of suitable diameter for each pipe in the network from the list of commercially available diameters. The CE methodology is applied to two bench mark WDN design problems taken from literature for validation. The first WDN problem deals with determining...