Mercury is a very toxic element. Due to its volubility it is present everywhere in the environment at ambient temperature. High temperature processes increased levels of mercury on the global scale. Global and European action plans were established to reduce mercury emissions and remove mercury from the environment. Cement plants …
Nitrogen (N) is an essential nutrient for plant growth and one which has the greatest effect on the yield. Since effective indigenous sources are insufficient by far to support current levels of global agricultural outputs, N is intensively applied by farmers in the form of N-based fertilisers. However, excessive rates …
Organotin compounds (OTCs) are the organometallic compounds with the most numerous applications. Today, it is more than 50 years of their intensive development and use. While they are highly useful chemicals they are also extremely toxic to a wide array of aquatic and terrestrial living organisms at very low concentrations. …
In this thesis, we address the task of learning models for predicting structured outputs, which take as input a tuple of attribute values and produce as output a structured object. In contrast to classification and regression, where the output is a single scalar value, in our case the output is …
With the advent of System-on-Chip (SoC), intense research efforts are being carried out in order to find efficient practical solutions for testing deeply embedded, mixed-signal cores. Due to restricted access, a built-in self-test (BIST) of mixed-signal cores is in many cases a preferred alternative to a conventional test using external …
This thesis presents studies of probability of heterogeneous recombination of oxygen and hydrogen atoms on surfaces of different types of carbon-based materials. The probability of heterogenous recombination is described with a quantity called recombination coefficient, which is defined as the probability that an atom which impinges upon a solid surface …
This thesis presents studies of ultrafast carrier relaxation dynamics in charge density wave (CDW) materials by means of femtosecond time-resolved optical spectroscopy. In these experiments, a femtosecond pump pulse excites electrons via interband transitions, thereby changing the optical properties of the material. The dynamics of relaxation processes is then recorded …
The presence of pharmaceutical residues in surface waters is an emerging environmental issue that provides a new challenge to treatment systems for potable water, wastewater and water reuse. Their principle pathways into the sewerage system are twofold: first, after being administered to patients they are normally excreted as various metabolites …
Data analysis with machine learning methods, when applied to large collections of text data, enables us to discover new knowledge. This knowledge, once put together, might describe the still unknown connections among phenomena and thus contribute to the formation of new hypotheses in different fields, medicine including. Also, connectivity and …
Unexpected production breakdowns and unpredictable defects in product quality remain critical problems in modern manufacturing systems. Usually occuring by no obvious exterior cause and often during periods of smooth production, they lead to production losses and reduced process availability, which results in lower profit rates. Conventional statistical methods of process …