Search

An effective air quality monitoring network (AQMN) is able to promptly reflect the characteristics of ambient air pollutants for air pollution control and management nearby potential hazardous emissions. This research proposed an innovative spatiotemporal-spectrum manifold analysis to investigate the multi-pollutant emission variation and sampling. The analysis established a coordinate system with spatial relation, temporal correlation, and the frequency spectrum of the multi-pollutant emission data. The pairwise manifold distances were estimated accordingly. We formulated a manifold-based multi-objective optimization model, which optimizes the population coverage and monitoring efficiency of the AQMN nearby the emission. We applied the manifold analysis and the optimization model to a petrochemical complex in Taiwan. The spatial and temporal variation of the complex’s multi-pollutant emission was analyzed. Then, the optimization model solved for the best configuration of AQMN that satisfied the design objectives. We examined the tradeoff between the multiple objectives. Improvement of the existing monitoring stations was suggested based on the optimization results. Adding one or two monitoring stations at the densely populated area was recommended to provide better coverage for residents. Our results also settled for an optimal addition location to increase monitoring efficiency.

Urban metabolism analyzes the supply and consumption of nutrition, material, energy, and other resources within cities. Food, water, and energy are critical resources for the human society and have complicated cooperative/competitive influences on each other. The management of interactive resources is essential for supply chain analysis. This research analyzes the food-water-energy system of urban metabolism for sustainable resources management. A system dynamics model is established to investigate the urban metabolism of food, water, and energy resources. This study conducts a case study of Shihmen Reservoir system, hydropower generation, paddy rice irrigation of Taoyuan and Shihmen Irrigation Associations, and water consumption in Taoyuan, New Taipei, and Hsinchu cities. The interactive influence of the food-water-energy nexus is quantified in this study, the uncertainty analysis of food, water, and energy nexus is presented.

This research aims to analyze the food–energy interactive nexus of sustainable urban plant factory systems. Plant factory systems grow agricultural products within artificially controlled growing environment and multi-layer vertical growing systems. The system controls the supply of light, temperature, humidity, nutrition, water, and carbon dioxide for growing plants. Plant factories are able to produce consistent and high-quality agricultural products within less production space for urban areas. The production systems use less labor, pesticide, water, and nutrition. However, food production of plant factories has many challenges including higher energy demand, energy costs, and installation costs of artificially controlled technologies. In the research, stochastic optimization model and linear complementarity models are formulated to conduct optimal and equilibrium food–energy analysis of plant factory production. A case study of plant factories in the Taiwanese market is presented.

An ecosystem model was developed to simulate the water quality and plankton dynamics in the Danshuei River estuary, Taiwan. The model simulates the hydrodynamics with a laterally integrated 2-dimensional intratidal numerical model, which supplies the physical transport processes for simulation of water quality and plankton state variables. The application of the model to the Danshuei River estuary indicates that the point source loadings are mainly responsible for the degraded water quality and very high nutrient concentrations in the estuary. The impacts of wastewater discharges are tightly controlled by the transport processes. Frequent occurrence of high river flow and flood events rapidly cleanses the estuary by flushing out both pollutants and plankton populations. The plankton is allowed to grow to significant populations if low river flow lasts for a period much longer than the biological time scale.

A vertical (laterally integrated) two-dimensional numerical model was applied to study the salt water intrusion in the Tanshui River estuarine system, Taiwan. The river system has experienced dramatic changes in the past half century because of human intervention. The construction of two reservoirs and water diversion in the upper reaches of the river system significantly reduces the freshwater inflow. The land subsidence within the Taipei basin and the enlargement of the river constriction at Kuan-Du have lowered the river bed. Both changes have contributed farther to the intrusion of tidal flow and salt water in the upstream direction. The model was reverified with the earliest available hydrographic data measured in 1977. The overall performance of the model is in reasonable agreement with the field data. The model was then used to investigate the change in salt water intrusion as a result of reservoir construction and bathymetric changes in the river system. The model simulation study reveals that significant salinity increases have resulted from the combined changes. It has been speculated by ecological researchers that the long-term increase in salinity might be the driving force altering the aquatic ecosystem structure in the lower reach of the estuary and the Kuan-Du mangrove swamp, particularly the enlargement of the mangrove area and the disappearance of freshwater marshes. However, concrete proof has not been available since no prototype salinity data were available prior to the reservoir construction. This case study offers the first quantitative estimate of the salinity changes due to human interference in this natural system.

The residence time of an estuary is defined in this study as the average time the initially existing water parcels reside in the system before they are flushed out. The residence time of the Danshuei River is calculated through a series of numerical experiments using a laterally integrated two-dimensional hydrodynamic eutrophication model (HEM-2D). The results show that the residence time is on the order of 1e2 days under the mean river flow to zero river flow condition, which is very short compared with most time scales of biogeochemical processes. A procedure is developed to quantify individual contribution to flushing by each of the three major physical transport mechanisms: tide, river discharge, and the density induced circulation. The results indicated that, in general conditions, tidal flushing exerts the greatest influence to the flushing of the Danshuei River estuary, while the density induced circulation hardly contributes any. Tidal transport contributes more than 50% of the flushing when river discharge is below its longterm mean. The suitability of applying the tidal prism method, the modified tidal prism methods, and the fraction of freshwater method in this estuary is also investigated. The relatively short residence time is likely to be one of the limiting factors that result in low phytoplankton biomass in spite of extremely high nutrient concentrations, and causes a significant fraction of pollutants to exert their effects in the coastal waters outside the estuary. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Limited data in literature revealed a relatively low hydrogen yield from wastewater sludge, ca. 0.16 mg/g-dried solids, using anaerobic fermentation. We demonstrated in this work a much higher hydrogen yield, around 1.1 mg-H2/g-dried solids using a clostridium strain isolated from the sludge sample. The formed hydrogen would be consumed after passing the peak value at around 30–36 h of fermentation. We examined the effects of employing five different pre-treatments on substrate sludge, but noted no appreciable enhancement in hydrogen yield as commonly expected for methane production. Since a vast amount of organic matters had been released to water after hydrogen fermentation, we externally dosed methanogenic bacteria to the fermented liquor to produce methane. The fermented liquor could produce more methane than the non-fermented sample, indicating that the dosed methanogenic bacteria readily utilized the organic matters derived from the fermentation test.

The effects of mangrove trees on the flow field in a tidal estuary during high freshwater discharge events are investigated using a depth-averaged two-dimensional hydrodynamic model. The model is refined to include the effects of mangrove trees on flow resistance. The resistance is described by a set of two empirical equations depending on water depth and vegetative parameters. The vegetative parameters are investigated and tested using on-site samples of Kandelia plants. The model is calibrated and verified with experimental data measured in a physical model. The agreement between the measured and computed water surface elevation is good. The model is then applied to the entire tidal Tanshui River system, which includes mangrove swamps near the mouth of the Keelung River. The flow patterns and resistance distributions are investigated for several scenarios of high flow events. The results show that the refined model provides an ideal management tool for the mangrove swamps.

This paper addresses the variation of substrate status with flow in the framework of habitat simulation. The Physical Habitat Simulation System (PHABSIM) was developed as a tool for water management and has become one of the most popular methods worldwide. Despite its many advantages, the variation of channel properties with flow is not addressed in PHABSIM. We modified PHABSIM by incorporating a sub-program that can perform substrate analyses under five different schemes for evaluating the substrate suitability. These schemes include the conventional methods to specify the substrate attribute (scheme 1) and to use the mean grain size of the original bed material for determining the substrate suitability (scheme 2), or employ the threshold conditions for sediment entrainment to evaluate the nominal grain size of the stable substrate (schemes 3–5). As a case study, Sinogastromyzon puliensis in Chou-Shui Creek (Taiwan) is selected as the target species for the habitat simulation. For schemes 1 and 2, the substrate attribute specified for each cell of a cross-section does not change with flow. The nominal grain size of the stable armour material (scheme 5) is generally greater than the nominal grain sizes of the above-critical bed material (scheme 3) and the static armour layer (scheme 4). The simulation results indicate that the suitability values specified in scheme 1 and the resulting habitat area are on the optimistic side, whereas scheme 2 tends to undervalue the suitability of the hydraulically worked substrate. The overall variation trends of the weighted usable area (or percentage usable area) curves for different substrate schemes are similar, especially in the in-phase regions of the water velocity and depth. The results of this study appear to imply that the flow-related habitat analyses are not usually sensitive to substrate. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.