The Passivhaus Standard is a construction concept based on affordably achieving the best indoor conditions with the lowest energy demand. If adopted, it could contribute to fulfil the lack of regulations in energy and comfort performance in Colombian dwellings that the current sustainability laws mandate. The Standard has been applied in warm regions mostly throughout the Mediterranean.This work intended to study its applicability for social housing in tropical climates, specifically four Colombian cities with different average energy demands and number of occupants per household and diverse climatic conditions. The work identified and described a reference building based on an average ‘good practice’ social housing project product of the current Building Regulations. It was modelled in the Passivhaus Planning Package (PHPP) to analyse its performance in the four cities. The results showed that the thermal performance of the building envelope is better than expected due to favourable climatic conditions in most of the cities, although it needs improvements. Even if primary energy demand is lower in the four cities than the maximum allowed by the Standard, it would be considerably high for dwellings without mechanical heating or cooling. The improved models showed that adopting passive strategies according to local climates reduced daily temperature swings and increased indoor comfort. Applying energy efficiency measures such as solar thermal DHW and more efficient fridges and lighting decreased primary energy demand significantly to less than a half of the maximum allowed. The Standard would be applicable in tropical climates even within the budget limitations for social housing in Colombia, although not exactly in the same way as in central Europe. Local circumstances and passive strategies must be taken into account to feasibly achieve the Passivhaus Standard in Colombian social housing.

Youth suicidality is a worldwide major concern; even more, if a specific population of youth, as young people in the child welfare system, are likely to be at higher risk. Therefore, emerge the need to identify particular characteristics that may be predictors of these suicidal behaviors in order to provide better prevention and intervention programs. Portugal is a country that does not have information regarding youth suicide in care. Seeking to contribute to this matter this study aims to make a profile of young Portuguese people (of 16- and 17- years old) in residential care with suicide attempts, identifying the relation between suicidality and sociodemographic variables, type of placement and maltreatment, mental health problems and risk behaviors. Comparisons of the data gathered were made on adolescents in residential care with suicide attempts and adolescents without it, bivariate analyzes were carried out to identify the difference between samples. Results supported a statistical relationship with physical neglect as a type of maltreatment, and alcohol and drugs abuse as factors that may increase the risk of suicide attempts. Regarding mental health, treatments do not cover the whole population with suicide attempts, with lightly less of half of the adolescents with suicidality not receiving psychiatric treatment. Further analysis is needed to identify if more rigorous mental health treatment might reduce suicidality. Resúmen: La tendencia suicida en los jóvenes es una preocupación importante a nivel mundial; aún más, si una población específica, como aquellos quienes están en el sistema de bienestar, tienen probabilidades de tener riesgos mayores. Por esta razón, surge la necesidad de identificar características particulares de los jóvenes en el sistema de bienestar que puedan predecir comportamientos suicidas con el fin de proporcionar mejores programas de prevención e intervención. Portugal es un país que no tiene información sobre el suicidio juvenil en el sistema de bienestar. Buscando contribuir a esta área, el siguiente estudio pretende hacer un perfil de jóvenes portugueses (de 16 y 17 años) en acogimiento residencial con intentos de suicidio, identificando la relación entre la variable tendencias suicidas y variables sociodemográficas, perfil del acogimiento y tipo de maltrato, problemas de salud mental y comportamientos de riesgo. Se compararon los datos de adolescentes en acogimiento residenciales con intentos de suicidio y adolescentes sin intentos, llevando a cabo análisis bivariados para identificar la diferencia entre las muestras. Los resultados revelaron una relación estadística entre negligencia física como un tipo de maltrato, y abuso de alcohol y drogas como factores que pueden aumentar el riesgo de intentos suicidas. En cuanto a la salud mental, se identificó que los tratamientos no cubren a todos los jóvenes con intentos de suicidio, hallando que no reciben tratamiento psiquiátrico un poco menos de la mitad de los adolescentes con tendencias suicidas. Por esta razón, se considera necesario realizar más análisis para identificar si un tratamiento de salud mental más riguroso podría reducir las tendencias suicidas.

In the last years Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) has received an increasing attention in academic research due to its ability to achieve optimal process operation of nonlinear processes. NMPC has been applied to several pilot plants; however major obstacles like plant model mismatch and disturbances have to be overcome in order to allow industrial applications. Multi-stage NMPC (MSNMPC) is a robust NMPC approach which achieves optimal process operation under uncertainties of the process model. A complete workflow from simulation studies to real application of MSNMPC has been developed to overcome the mentioned obstacles. However, explicit knowledge from the fields of mathematics, optimization theory, and process control is required. Therefore, efficient methods for evaluation of MSNMPC that support the transition from simulation to application in the real process are required. In this master thesis a module that applies several evaluation methods to offline simulations of MSNMPC is developed. The effectiveness of the module is shown in the case study of an industrial batch polymerization reactor.

The need of understanding the relationship between the physical habitat and ecology in the fluvial systems has become a major issue due to an increasing environmental conciousness but also because of the normativity which demand the achievement of the good status of the water bodies and its ecosystems. Exactly this requirement is prescribed by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) which have included the hydromorphology as an important aspect of evaluation due to the influence that it has on the ecology of a river system. The hydromorphology gets relevance because it study the system as a whole, involving the interactions between ecology, hydrology and fluvial geomorphology. As a response to the WFD each country of the European Union has developed a method for guaranteeing the compliance of the normativity. Elements of such methods and of international literature are collected for the development of a methodology that fulfill the gaps of the current Colombian water normativity and support the decision making in the environmental planning and impact assessment. This guide for the river morphological restoration in Colombia is a complete hydromorphological analysis of a selected river which main purpose is to make an approach to the general aspects of the river in the macro scale, followed by an assessment in the meso scale in which the river is segmented, classified and the hydromorphological conditions are scored; finally, a simulation is performed for a critical reach, called in this work the “bottle neck” reach. The simulation consists in a hydrodynamics model (or hydromorphodynamics model as optional), its results of depth, velocity and substrate in combination with the preferences of a fish indicator species, are computed in the software CASiMiR and give the habitat suitability in the study area for the simulated conditions. The application of such methodology is applied in a mountainous river reach downstream the Punt da Gall dam in Switzerland for which the hydromorphological aspects in the macro and meso scale are assessed and in the micro scale the habitat distribution of fish indicator species are calculated. The present work is an attempt to apply the habitat simulation as a tool for determining hydromorphological quality, for river restoration activities and for determining minimum habitat conditions when the discharge is regulated. Future investigations include the application in a Colombian river for which the collection of biological data still is a challenge.

This research is focused on obtaining an important reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from the use of fossil fuels by increasing the efficiency of pre-combustion carbon capture. It examines a new, low-risk, approach that uses conventional water gas shift reactors and acid gas removal technology in a unusual arrangement, within an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle power plant (IGCC). Timmins (2010) proposed a flowsheet of this nature and it is this flowsheet that is used as the starting point for this research project. Process simulation in UniSim Design R390 is conducted  to validate the viability of such  a flowsheet and to investigate optimal plant configuration. The modelling output is compared to US DOE baseline studies for competing technologies (2010).The physical solvent, Selexol, is used for cardon dioxide (CO2) absorption as recommended by researchers as the most energy efficient amongst the range of physical and chemical solvents investigated. There are mainly two thermodynamic models required to meet all of the needs of this complex process. Most of the process is modelled with the Peng-Robinson equation of state but the Selexol absorber and desorber is modelled using the non-random-two-liquid model  (NRTL) for the liquid phase and the ideal gas law for the vapour phase. A beseline flowsheet model is successfully modelled that could be attached to an IGCC plant to enable it to continue producing electric power whilst capturing 90% of the carbon derived from the fuel. The model is used for process development, and for energy efficiency evaluation. Every major item of capital equipment has been included, modelled and sized to produce a cost analysis and additionallly, the model output was used for a preliminary life cycle analysis (LCA). From the results produced in this study, the proposed process appears to be a feasible, energy-efficient, alternative technology for incorporating carbon capture within an IGCC flowsheet.

On average, 44% of total water abstraction in Europe is used in agriculture. Evidence of water scarcity in Europe is borne out by research that shows increasing strain on water resources in 30% of EU member states. Current research seems to validate the view that wastewater treatment and reuse is a technical opportunity to address the imbalances between agricultural water demand and European water resources in the long term. Currently, just 2.4% of wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluents are reused, and thus the water reuse potential in Europe remains high. This document reports on and analyses the performance of a prototype-scale plant installed to treat real wastewater in rural Spain using a Treat & Reuse Membrane Bioreactor (T&R MBR). It shows that the T&R MBR is an improvement on MBR operations due to the fact that it produced a solids-free, nutrient rich and high-quality permeate in which Escherichia Coli was removed to values < 1 ufc/100ml. Furthermore, Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD5), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Turbidity and Suspended Solids (SS) were typically lowered to concentrations below the legal limit established in countries such as France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Portugal. Additionally, the system was able to extract nutrients from the wastewater inflow and to retain them in the permeate at 80% and 60% of the Nitrogen (once transformed to Nitrates) and Phosphorous, respectively. These results, combined with the continuing reduction of capital and operating costs for the T&R MBRs, suggest that they are an increasingly cost-effective technology for producing treated effluents suitable for water reuse in agriculture. This study also suggests possible limitations regarding the fate of micro-pollutants during treatment. Nevertheless, the system works efficiently so long as the wastewater input meets the typical composition of raw municipal wastewater with minor contributions of industrial wastewater. This would imply low concentration of trace organic contaminants (TrOCs) and Heavy Metals, as well as slight to moderate salinity (i.e. 0.7-3.0 dS/m). In spite of the fact that the T&R MBR technology can reduce the fresh water and fertilizer consumption of the agriculture sector, this system cannot be implemented in countries where the legislation restricts the reuse of effluents with significant concentrations of Nitrates and Phosphorous (e.g., Germany). Therefore, the present document suggests a set of technical criteria addressing the European challenges regarding water reuse in agriculture.

This article compares the critical barrier to civil war settlement in El Salvador and Colombia and analyzes the violence behavior in the post accord period. It emphasizes that in Colombia, some political parties argue about a Colombian salvadorization of violence, whose primary claim is seeing in the settlement with FARC-EP the reason of violence increasement in principal cities, as occurred in El Salvador during de post-accord period. It compares, in both countries, the war background, the negotiations process and the homicide rate in the post-accord period to point out that violence behavior after the conflict in El Salvador and Colombia is quite different and it is no possible to argue that in Colombia homicides will increase in all national territory as occurs in El Salvador. The article concludes refuting salvadorization thesis and identifies new tendencies of violence in Colombia influenced by a readjustment of forces in border territories without adversely effects in principal cities.

The role of memory in judicial settings produces truths; In the case of Land Restitution, the memories of the victims are equivalent to social evidence. During this process, the victims' stories are complemented with institutional records and the information collected in the field work, carried out by the Unit as evidence to fail the sentences. These memories are key to the integral reparation, which includes within the orders of the sentences a series of economic and symbolic benefits, with which they transform their lives. In the case of La Palma, the stories have been used to identify land abandonment patterns, given the fear imparted by irregular groups, as their inhabitants were forced to move to neighboring municipalities , the return and the economic impulse that gave them the technical support and the estate plan agreed with the Unit. Likewise, their stories propase strategies to strengthen other reparatiÓn programs in the future, in which new generations are included, from social innovation initiatives, where agricultural products are harvested and processed with value proposals, to reduce the gap between The rural and urban world.

Modern data acquisition techniques such as Global positioning system (GPS), Radio-frequency identification (RFID) and mobile phones have resulted in the collection of huge amounts of data in the form of trajectories during the past years. Popularity of these technologies and ubiquity of mobile devices seem to indicate that the amount of spatio-temporal data will increase at accelerated rates in the future. Many previous studies have focused on efficient techniques to store and query trajectory databases. Early approaches to recovering information from this kind of data include single predicate range and nearest neighbour queries. However, they are unable to capture collective behaviour and correlations among moving objects. Recently, a new interest for querying patterns capturing ‘group’ or ‘common’ behaviours have emerged. An example of this type of pattern are moving flocks. These are defined as groups of moving objects that move together (within a predefined distance to each other) for a certain continuous period of time. Current algorithms to discover moving flock patterns report problems in scalability and the way the discovered patterns are reported. The field of frequent pattern mining has faced similar problems during the past decade, and has sought to provided efficient and scalable techniques which successfully deal with those issues. This research proposes a framework which integrates techniques for clustering, pattern mining detection, postprocessing and visualization in order to discover and analyse moving flock patterns in large trajectory datasets. The proposed framework was tested and compared with a current method (BFE algorithm). Synthetic datasets simulating trajectories generated by large number of moving objects were used to test the scalability of the framework. Real datasets from different contexts and characteristics were used to assess the performance and analyse the discovered patterns. The framework shows to be efficient, scalable and modular. This research shows that moving flock patterns can be generalized as frequent patterns and state-of-the-art algorithms for frequent pattern mining can be used to detect the moving flock patterns. This research develops preliminary visualization of the most relevant findings. Appropriate interpretation of the results demands further analysis in order to display the most relevant information.

Green technology developments bring public managers to the table with entrepreneurs who want to promote new technologies and share regard for the public good. The introduction of green technologies to the general public evidences that the challenge of technological change spans to a sphere of social interactions that operate in the breakthrough. This phase is best characterized as an inter-organizational process and my research explores the patterns that emerge through it. My research focuses on the development of a solar energy venture, the Solar-to-market initiative based in Massachusetts. By treating the creation of this venture as a dynamic system, I will highlight the role of public-private and third sector partnerships in shaping policies and technology innovation. The core question of the research is addressed by mapping out the networks that emerge throughout the process from project design to implementation. I urge public managers and entrepreneurs to consider the following aspects when managing green technological environmental ventures: (1) Design a framework for setting goals, policies, responsibilities and negotiation terms during the technological development and implementation phase, from design to commercialization. (2) Because of the complexity involved in green technological innovation, organizations demand a high degree of interdependence to share knowledge, complementary operational capabilities and joint action; thus creating the mechanisms to maintain these interactions is crucial. (3) A shift from traditional energy systems requires a change of social structures and institutional settings that demand the participation of the various stakeholders to co-produce and adopt the technological developments. (4) The societal change that technology demands, can be reached by mobilizing civic groups and social structures without threatening public institutions. (5) Green technological environmental ventures can be managed through an experimental and learning-oriented approach that enables a strategic niche management. Learning from small systems provides basis for policy innovations that are necessary for paving the way to sustainability as practices, such as energy consumption demand not incremental changes but a system transformation. In brief, I consider that a system of adaptive technology developments based on smaller operating parts within larger systems, which have acquired valuable knowledge and experience while working cooperatively, can contribute to a more equal and sustainable development.