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Background: Business innovations are continuous strategic initiatives of doing work better and faster, creating thereby greater value for consumers of products and/or users of services. Digital transformation, digital technologies, and digital innovation, frame the change of an operating business model. In addition to the influence of everything “digital”, the occurrence of disruptions affects businesses suddenly and thrives for an urgent response, especially when disruptions have a global impact, like the Covid- 19 pandemic did. Objectives: This research aims to present a conceptual framework, that should help organizations of any size, when influenced by a disruption, to steer change or innovation endeavours to the most feasible option aiming at digital transformation. Methods/Approach: The proposed conceptual framework can be used as a basis for operationalization through already known models, concepts, and frameworks by focusing on success when dealing with disruptions and in striving for digital transformation, as a presented case study illustrates. Results: New framework allow organizations to assess their readiness and willingness to change, by guiding the organization’s management through the change options most feasible to their current state and desired future. The application is based on internal and external factors affecting the digital transformation process, aiming for maturity and process success. Conclusions: The framework application process is designed for assessing the readiness and willingness when initiating future digital transformation. The framework is supported by a demonstrative application on a case study and could be used to help management and CEO in the decision-making process that could lead an organization towards digital transformation.

Half of today’s global energy consumption is in the form of heating and cooling. Solar collectors are the most promising sustainable alternative to fossil fuels in this sector. The most important component in a solar collector is the receiver, which by use of a selective surface absorbs and converts solar irradiance to thermal energy. Herein, a novel selective surface for low-to mid-temperature solar collectors is developed, studied and presented. The surface is produced by electroplating a cobalt-chromium coating on a stainless steel substrate using an electrolyte based on a deep eutectic solvent. Our method makes use of trivalent instead of traditionally used hexavalent chromium, which significantly reduces health-related issues and makes it more environmentally benign. We obtain a coating of chromium doped cobalt where the surface exhibits an absorptance and emittance of 0.96 and 0.14, respectively, giving it a solar-to-thermal efficiency of 0.95. An observed loss in optical effi­ ciency, is shown to correlate to an oxidation of the metallic cobalt to Co3O4 at elevated temperatures. We further show that this oxidation can be mitigated by dip-coating a protective silica top coating, which concurrently improves the optical selectivity of the surface. The present selective surface is efficient, cheap, scalable, and easy to produce sustainably, making it competitive to industry standards. We foresee that our method will have impact on the advancement of improved low-to mid-temperature solar collectors, assisting a faster transition towards a sustainable society.

مع العصر الحديث، اجتاحت رقمنة المعرفة مختلف الميادين، وتغيّر معها مفهوم البحث والكتابة وآلياته وما يرتبط بهما من النشر الورقي والرقمي. إذ بات العالم يعيش موجة كبرى من تناقل البيانات المكتوبة رقميًا، ومن سهولة النسخ والانتحال، مما أغرق وسائل التواصل الرقمية بسيل هائل من الكتابات، والتي تفتقد أحيانًا الموثوقية العلمية بغياب الإسناد والتوثيق. بل إن بعض من امتهنوا الكتابة بشكل غير احترافي، استسهلوا عملية النقل قصًّا ولصقًا دون العودة إلى الأصل، مما أضاع هوية المنقول، وأفقده نسبه الأصلي بعد استبعاد معيار الأمانة العلمية التي هي من أهم صفات الباحث، في أي ميدان من الميادين. يعالج هذا البحث كيفية تطور توثيق الخبر من الرواية الشفوية الى الاسناد المكتوب في المتن وصولاً الى الحاشية السفلية وظهورها في الطباعة

Almost every year, ash drifts from forest fires in north-western Canada into northern Europe, altering forecasts on both continents, settling in Antarctic ice and turning the skies over the world’s major cities an apocalyptic orange. As smoke drifts from the forests into nearby communities and distant urban centres, it becomes the medium through which most people experience forest fire, leaving traces on memories and bodies. Although wildfires and their associated plumes are getting worse, people have a long and dynamic relationship with forest fire smoke which can be understood through the lens of air pollution and forestry history. Using British Columbia, Canada as a case study, I argue that the difficulty of separating wildfire smoke from other types of air pollution has worked to the advantage of land managers interested in supporting the forestry industry, with negative impacts for northern communities.

This study explores and analyses the kinetic and mechanistic aspects of microfiltration cellulose acetate mem- brane fouling by polyamide (PA) and polystyrene (PS) particles in dead-end configuration and the main in- teractions between the microplastics and the membrane during the filtration process. First, PA and PS particles were characterised to define the differences in shape (regular and irregular), particle size distribution (10–105 μm and 20–320 μm), and surface charge (neutral and negative). The results showed that the prevailing mech- anisms during microplastic filtrations were complete pore blocking followed by cake layer formation in both cases. The mechanisms’ kinetics were positively correlated to MPs load through a power-law relationship which was stronger for PS than for PA particles because of higher steric hindrance effects. On the other hand, increasing the working transmembrane pressure led to an optimum working condition, between 0.3 and 0.5 bar for PA and 0.3 bar for PS filtration. Overall, higher fouling was induced by the PA particles due to the higher PA hydro- phobicity and their smaller size, which caused a denser cake layer. Instead, PS particles with higher irregularities and repulsive electrostatic forces formed a more porous layer but induced a high degree of abrasion on the membrane surface. Finally, membrane fouling led to an increase in hydrophobicity and roughness, probably causing further fouling. To conclude, modelling membrane fouling can help predict the best working conditions and the membrane replacement cycles to increase the MPs removal efficiency and reduce secondary MP-based pollution.

Abstract: Increased pressures from human activities may cause cumulative ecological effects on marine ecosystems. Increasingly, the study of ecosystem services is applied in the marine environment to assess the full effects of human activities on the ecosystem and on the benefits it provides. However, in the marine environment, such integrated studies have yet to move from qualitative and scorebased to fully quantitative assessments. To bridge this gap, this study proposed a 4-tiered method for summarizing available knowledge and modelling tools to aid in quantitative assessments of ecosystem services supply. First, the ecosystem functioning mechanisms underlying the supply of services are conceptually mapped. Second, the impacts of the human activity of interest are summarized and linked to the first conceptual model in a case-specific model of ecosystem services supply. Third, indicators are selected that would best represent changes in the most important parameters of the conceptual model in a quantitative manner. Fourth, the knowledge gained in the previous steps is used to select models that are most useful to quantify changes in ecosystem services supply under the human pressure of interest. This approach was applied to the case study of offshore wind energy in the Belgian part of the North Sea, which is one of the most rapidly expanding industries in the marine environment globally. This study provides a useful tool to proceed towards quantification of marine ecosystem services, highlighting the need for a fully integrated approach to developing environmental impact assessment tools.

This study investigates the impact of the membrane reactor (MR) technology with in-situ removal of water to boost the performance of the one-step DME synthesis via CO2 hydrogenation at process scale. Given the higher efficiency in converting the feedstock, the membrane reactor allows for a remarkable decrease in the main cost drivers of the process, i.e., the catalyst mass and the H2 feed flow, by ca. 39% and 64%, respectively. Furthermore, the MR-assisted process requires 46% less utilities than the conventional process, especially in terms of cooling water and refrigerant, with a corresponding decrease in environmental impact (i.e., 25% less CO2 emissions). Both the conventional and MR-assisted plants were found effective for the mitigation of the CO2 emissions, avoiding ca. 1.4–1.6 . However, given the higher reactor and process efficiency, the membrane technology contributes to a significant reduction (i.e., 25%) in the operating costs, which is a remarkable improvement in this OPEX intensive process. Nevertheless, the calculated minimum DME selling price (i.e., 1739 €/ton and 1960 €/ton for the MR-assisted and the conventional process, respectively) is over 3 times greater than the current DME market price. Yet, with the predicted decrease of renewable H2 price and a zero-to-negative cost for the CO2 feedstock, the MR-assisted system could become competitive with the benchmark between 2025 and 2050.

Carbon-encapsulated iron-cementite (Fe/Fe3C) magnetic nanoparticles were synthesized by an upscalable solid-state pyrolysis method using iron phthalocyanine as a precursor. The dependence of the structure, morphology and magnetic properties on the pyrolysis conditions is presented. The nanocomposite contains nanoparticles made of cementite with a small fraction of iron, with an average diameter of 15 nm embedded in an amorphous carbon matrix. A 3 nm thick graphite shell is formed on the surface of the particles. The volume fraction of α-Fe increases almost linearly on increasing pyrolysis temperature: from 0.5% for the sample synthesized at 800 ◦C up to 11% for a 900 ◦C pyrolysis temperature, resulting in an increase of the saturation magnetization from 14.0 to 17.74 Am2/kg and a decrease of the coercivity from 49.34 to 10.74 kA/m.