This study’s overarching aim is to establish the areal extent and characteristics of the rapid sugarcane expansion and land use change in São Paulo state (Brazil) as a result of an increase in the demand for ethanol, using Landsat type remotely sensed data. In 2003 flex fuel automobiles started to enter the Brazilian consumer market causing a dramatic expansion of sugarcane areas from 2.57 mill...

The electronic and materials properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), like those of recent discovered graphene and earlier found fullerenes, attracted lots of research interests due to their appealing applications1 in the field of molecular electronics or for the refinement of materials, such as antistatic paints and shieldings, sensor, and catalytic functionality in fuel cells, etc. Like its two...

Model predictive control represents one of the most promising methods, also in fast industrial applications like a Diesel engine. But especially Diesel engine control meets problems of uncertainties and disturbances, thus model-plant mismatch is omnipresent, which obviously decreases the performance of model based control. This paper compares different robust predictive control strategies appli...

Effects of cathode types on the long-term stability of microbial fuel cell (MFC) and the anodic microbial communities were studied using K(3)Fe(CN)(6) catholyte (R1), air cathode (R2) and biocathode (R3) over a testing time of 400 d. Upon 400 d of testing, the maximum power densities (P(max)) of R1 and R2 decreased by 44% and 37%, and the Coulombic efficiencies (CEs) decreased 8.4% (R1) and 2.0...

For the development of long lasting portable microbial fuel cells (MFCs) new strategies are necessary to overcome critical issues such as hydraulic pump system and the biochemical substrate retrieval overtime to sustain bacteria metabolism. The present work proposes the use of a synthetic solid anolyte (SSA), constituted by agar, carbonaceous and nitrogen sources dissolved into diluted seawater...

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) are receiving an increasing level of attention for both smalland large-scale applications due their high fuel flexibility compared to other types of fuel cells. This article reviews recent work in SOFC materials research, with an emphasis on anodes that can directly utilize hydrocarbon fuels.

Microfluidics is the science and technology of systems that process or manipulate small amounts (microto picoliters) of fluids, using channels with dimensions of tens to hundreds of micrometers (Whitesides, 2006). Microfluidics offers several advantages in a variety of fields including fuel cells (Dyer, 2002; Jankowski et al., 2002; Erdler et al., 2006; Nguyen et al., 2006; Morse, 2007; Kuriyam...