Upscaling

This study reports on the extent to which sustainability initiatives in the cocoa, coffee and soy value chains have been scaled up by companies. We have investigated how the private sector can be further stimulated to engage in, sustain and increase their involvement in actions to increase the sustainability of commodity chains with links to the Netherlands. The report analyses the motives for companies to join sustainability initiatives and their reasons for not engaging. It concludes with several recommendations on how government and value-chain stakeholders could further stimulate the scaling up of sustainability initiatives.

The aquifer heterogeneity is often simplified while conceptualizing numerical model due
to lack of field data. Conducting field measurements to estimate all the parameters at the aquifer
scale may not be feasible. Therefore, it is essential to determine the most significant parameters
which require field characterization. For this purpose, the sensitivity analysis is performed on
aquifer parameters, viz., anisotropic hydraulic conductivity, effective porosity and longitudinal
dispersivity. The results of the sensitivity index and root mean square deviation indicated, that the
longitudinal dispersivity and anisotropic hydraulic conductivity are the sensitive aquifer parameters
to evaluate seawater intrusion in the study area. The sensitive parameters are further characterized
at discrete points or at local scale by using regression analysis. The longitudinal dispersivity is
estimated at discrete well points based on Xu and Eckstein regression formula. The anisotropic
hydraulic conductivity is estimated based on established regression relationship between hydraulic
conductivity and electrical resistivity with R2 of 0.924. The estimated hydraulic conductivity in x and
y-direction are upscaled by considering the heterogeneous medium as statistically homogeneous at
each layer. The upscaled model output is compared with the transversely isotropic model output.
The bias error and root mean square error indicated that the upscaled model performed better than
the transversely isotropic model. Thus, this investigation demonstrates the necessity of considering
spatial heterogeneous parameters for effective modelling of the seawater intrusion in a layered
coastal aquifer.

Environmental impacts and consumer concerns have necessitated the study of bio-based materials as alternatives to petrochemicals for packaging applications. The purpose of this review is to summarize synthetic and non-synthetic materials feasible for packaging and textile applications, routes of upscaling, (industrial) applications, evaluation of sustainability, and end-of-life options. The outlined bio-based materials include polylactic acid, polyethylene furanoate, polybutylene succinate, and non-synthetically produced polymers such as polyhydrodyalkanoate, cellulose, starch, proteins, lipids, and waxes. Further emphasis is placed on modification techniques (coating and surface modification), biocomposites, multilayers, and additives used to adjust properties especially for barriers to gas and moisture and to tune their biodegradability. Overall, this review provides a holistic view of bio-based packaging material including processing, and an evaluation of the sustainability of and options for recycling. Thus, this review contributes to increasing the knowledge of available sustainable bio-based packaging material and enhancing the transfer of scientific results into applications.

Wettability is a key factor in uencing multiphase ow in porous media. In addition to the average contact angle, the spatial distribution of contact angles throughout the porous medium is important, as it directly controls the connectivity of wetting and nonwetting phases. The controlling factors may not only relate to the surface chemistry of minerals but also to their texture, which implies that a length-scale range from nanometers to centimeters has to be considered. So far, an integrated work ow addressing wettability consistently through the different scales does not exist. In this study, we demonstrate that such a workflow is possible by combining microcomputed tomography (CT) imaging with atomic-force microscopy (AFM).

This article discusses rationalizations in the Brazilian scientific community about a stretch of language that is idealized as the 'lan-guage fit for science'. In decoupling linguistic structures from the consequential whole of language practices, metadiscourses about the scaling up of science in Brazil (that is, its movement away from a national scale and towards English-language audiences) reduce power dynamics, institutional hierarchies, and global inequities to a flat, harmonious space and homogenous time where science supposedly unfolds. Although recent scholarship has produced empirical evidence that contemporary transcultural flows and encounters produce hybrid communicative resources and transidiomatic recom-binations, these creolized idioms are largely ignored in ideologies of the language of science. While this process of extracting an ideal-ized 'standard' from the realm of diversity and recombination is not new, the resulting anxieties and insecurities among those affected by pressures for going upscale are renewed, and should be critically assessed.

A problem that is common in agriculture but not very publicized, thanks to the absence of victims, is the rollover of Centre Pivot and Lateral Move irrigation systems. These accidents are due to particularly-strong winds acting on the spans, and they are potentially very destructive for the installations. Also, the restoration phase of the installations requires always an intervention of lifting of the machinery on the field, with a potential further damage to crops (setting) and land (compaction). Given the basic inevitability of the phenomenon, due to atmospheric events, these rollovers could be however limited e.g. by proposing a system design granting a higher stability. Therefore, we have firstly modelled the rollover dynamics of these systems, considering the geometry, the masses, the forces acting on them (wind, gravity), the position of the centre of gravity. Then, thanks to morphometry, we have investigated booms’ stability as a consequence of a proportional or not-proportional alteration of the system sizes, in particular: the upscaling of supports, done by some manufacturers, and the lengthening of spans, often required by customers. Morphometry is a method born in biology, typically used to describe and analyse statistically the shape variations within and among samples of organisms as a result of growth, experimental treatments or evolution. As the idea of evolutionary adaptation is intrinsic in the technical evolution of human-made systems (models, variants) operated by manufacturers, also artificial systems can be studied or improved via the morphometry, as operated here. The output of this study is a physical model of rollover and a sensitivity analysis of a reference configuration for an irrigation boom. Thanks to these analyses, we were able to demonstrate, for example, how a scaling-up of boom supports, respectful of geometric ratios, can increase the system stability despite the elevation of the pressure point of the wind on the frame.