in the current engineering practices, buildings are commonly designed for an effective lifetime of 50 years. this lifetime can increase the cost of buildings with short lifetimes and can reduce the safety level of buildings with large lifetimes. in this paper, a “service-life factor” has been defined. applying this factor into the nominal values of live, earthquake, wind, and snow loads, the ef...

This paper presents results of investigations on physicochemical treatment of vegetable oil refinery wastewater (VORW), namely acid and technological wastewater. The study has shown that VORW has a varying high pollution load (organic matter, sulfates, phosphates and chlorides) and the removal of these pollutants from acid wastewater was more effective than that from technological wastewater; t...

Membrane bioreactors (MBRs) can be broadly defined as systems integrating biological degradation of waste products with membrane filtration. They have proven quite effective in removing organic and inorganic contaminants as well as biological entities from wastewater. Advantages of the MBR include good control of biological activity, high quality effluent free of bacteria and pathogens, smaller...

Many natural materials exhibit extraordinary combinations of mechanical properties which are achieved through highly tailored and organized hierarchical microstructures. In particular, materials which function as natural body armor, such as mollusk shells, possess a structure with important features and properties at a variety of length scales, from the various constituent building blocks to th...

This paper presents an overview of the research performed to date by a Swedish interdisciplinary team of scientists striving to develop multifunctional composite materials for storage of electric energy in mechanical load paths. To realise structural batteries from polymer composites, research pursued on carbon fibres for use as negative electrode in the battery as well as on polymer electrolyt...

Chronic exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in wildlife might alter the response to environmental changes through interference with the regulation of stress hormones. Here, we examined the relationship between blood concentrations of several POPs and baseline plasma corticosterone levels in the black-legged kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) during three distinct periods in the breeding ...

The Solina-Myczkowce complex of reservoirs (SMCR) accounts about 15 % of the water storage in Poland. On the base of historical (2004-2006 years) data, the mass balance of nitrogen, phosphorus, total organic carbon and dissolved silicon were calculated. Large, natural affluents were the main source of the biogenic compounds in the studied ecosystem, delivering 90 % of TOC, 87 % of TN and 81 % o...

Mangrove ecosystem is a very unique ecosystem in the Earth, which is under threat due to habitat loss, aquaculture expansion, overharvesting and increase of pollution load. In this review paper, world-wide status of mangrove habitat loss, the role of mangrove to act as a sink of pollutants and carbon capture (carbon sequestration), accumulation and biomagnifications of heavy metals is discussed...