Journal of Environmental Sciences Juniper Publishers

  Abstract The demand for Critical Minerals (CMs) is soaring because of their extensive use in renewable energy generation, energy storage, energy transmission, scientific instrumentation, and a wide range of communication, military, and transport technologies. However, the supply of CMs faces several critical challenges like • a few countries have a monopoly in mining and processing of particular CMs • variable concentration and deposit grades in different geographical areas • inadequate assessment of resources • inefficient mining, extraction, and processing technologies, • little to no recycling • limited workforce and • severe environmental and human health impacts associated with CM mining, processing, and production. For environmentally sustainable development of the CM industry, countries need to make significant investments in advanced competitive research, development of efficient environment-friendly mining, extraction, and processing te...

  Graphical Abstract In the past decades evaporation of water has been generally decreasing in most parts of the world with increasing air temperature, which is called the ‘evaporation paradox’. At Tharandt, Germany from 2004 to 2013 on annual basis the so-called ‘evaporation paradox’ had not existed because air temperature had not shown increasing trend. However, when we exclude Class A pan evaporation (E p ) in to consideration, indeed, it had existed on the summer half-year (Figure 1). Highlights a) Consideration of the warmer times of a year in a cold climate site. b) Use of methods very suitable for a very humid climate. c) Consideration of both measured and estimated evaporation schemes.      Read More about this Article: https://juniperpublishers.com/ijesnr/IJESNR.MS.ID.556142.php Read More Juniper Publishers Google Scholar : https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=4WXzQFMAAAAJ&citation_for...

  Abstract It is well established that Orange peeled oil biodiesel (OPOB) is a suitable fuel in Compression Ignition (CI) engines because of its compatible physicochemical properties with diesel. Literature is however sparse on its emission characteristics in CI engines majorly because few investigations have been done due to seemingly difficult and time-consuming experiments. On this strength, this work first carried out experimental investigations on carbon monoxide (CO), unburned hydrocarbon (UHC), oxides of nitrogen (NOX) and smoke of orange peel oil based biodiesel in single cylinder, four stroke CI engine; and afterwards applied the power of artificial neural networks (ANNs) prediction model to predict to the full-scale CO, UHC, NOX, and SMOKE values of the CI engine. Brake load, orange oil-diesel mixture percentages and engine speed were the inputs of the ANN while Levenberg Marquardt (trainlm) and scaled conjugate gradient (trainscg) were the training algor...