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Found 6342 publications
Image-Based Estimation of Porosity and Tortuosity in Fibrous Acoustic Absorbers
Publication Name: Engineering Reports
Publication Date: 2025-12-01
Volume: 7
Issue: 12
Page Range: Unknown
Description:
This study presents a fast and non-destructive image-based method for estimating two key acoustic parameters—open porosity and tortuosity—in fibrous sound-absorbing materials. The approach uses a single grayscale optical micrograph, which is down-sampled, contrast-equalized, and segmented via adaptive thresholding. From the resulting binary fiber mask, two geometric descriptors are extracted: coverage and a one-pixel-wide skeleton. Porosity is estimated using a simple linear formula calibrated on three reference materials, yielding an average absolute error below 0.3% when compared with argon gas pycnometry. Tortuosity is inferred from the total skeleton length relative to the image area, producing a stable ranking across materials with consistent bias relative to measured data. Additionally, a random forest model using only three image features—coverage, median fiber radius, and skeleton length—predicts airflow resistivity with over 70% explained variance. The full analysis pipeline is implemented in Python using open-source libraries (OpenCV, scikit-image) and runs in under half a second per image on standard hardware. This makes the method well suited for early-stage material screening, in-line quality control, or laboratory support, without the need for destructive testing or costly instruments. The approach bridges the gap between optical imaging and physical parameter estimation, offering a lightweight alternative to traditional porosity and impedance-tube measurements.
Open Access: Yes
DOI: 10.1002/eng2.70537
Qualitative analysis of the sustainability of local attachment and identity based on in-depth interviews conducted in two scattered farmstead settlements
Publication Name: Discover Sustainability
Publication Date: 2025-12-01
Volume: 6
Issue: 1
Page Range: Unknown
Description:
Based on qualitative research, the paper focuses on the transformation of the traditional lifestyle of scattered farmsteads in recent decades, primarily driven by economic shifts and demographic changes. The challenging conditions of agriculture and farming, and the rise of alternative economic activities, such as tourism, recreation, and small-scale business, have reshaped these rural settlements, contributing to a different social landscape. Besides, another important trend is the influx of newcomers, including professionals, entrepreneurs, and pensioners, who adopt alternative, often non-agricultural lifestyles while maintaining a strong sense of place attachment and identity. In contrast, younger generations of native inhabitants tend to migrate elsewhere due to limited prospects, better education and job opportunities, leading to a generational shift in the population base. This study investigates two farmstead settlements exemplifying the tendencies, highlighting how sustainability is increasingly supported not by the continuation of traditional practices, but by the emergence of new lifestyle patterns such as agritourism and rural commuting. The process of change reflects a transition in the meaning and practice of rural living, where sustainability is redefined by changing forms of identity and attachment supporting the survival of farmsteads in a postmodern world.
Open Access: Yes
The potential of the P-graph for optimizing public service processes
Publication Name: Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy
Publication Date: 2025-12-01
Volume: 27
Issue: 12
Page Range: 8461-8473
Description:
The European Union set out several directives and standards for governments and local authorities on environmental policy issues in the planning and management of public services. Public service provisioning is subject to both traditional expectations (such as customer-friendliness and efficiency) and new environmental stewardship and sustainability expectations. This paper analyzes public service processes, particularly the university enrolment process. Our analysis used public service models (Service Blueprinting, Business Process Modeling, Process Chain Network) and a mathematical model (P-graph). Our research aims to analyze the university enrolment process and its efficiency, considering sustainability aspects and expectations and identifying the points that can be modified and improved to make it more efficient, sustainable, qualitatively positive, and economical. According to our research, school administrators are overburdened during the enrolment process, often resulting in overtime work and a high turnover ratio. Our results clearly show the high inefficiency of this administrative process, as administrators can only partially meet their expected labor targets during their regular working hours. We found that the university enrolment process can be improved and made more efficient and sustainable. Using the P-graph, we have found the process’s optimal path and resource requirements in a way that was not feasible with previous models. Heartened by these results, we propose introducing and applying the P-graph as a new model to study other public service processes.
Open Access: Yes
Linking sustainability reporting and energy use through global reporting initiative standards and sustainable development goals
Publication Name: Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy
Publication Date: 2025-12-01
Volume: 27
Issue: 12
Page Range: 8659-8667
Description:
This paper addresses the critical need for an integrated approach to sustainability reporting by examining the transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles within the automotive industry. By focusing on the top 8 highest-revenue global automakers in 2022, the study utilizes the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to assess contributions to SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy) and other pertinent indicators. A comprehensive content analysis and logistic regression analysis are employed to explore the correlation between energy use and compliance with GRI standards from 2018 to 2022. The findings reveal significant trends in sustainability reporting, with a noted decrease in quality in the final year analyzed. Specifically, GRI 302-3 (energy intensity) shows a significant negative relationship with energy consumption, indicating higher energy usage correlates with lower compliance. The study reinforces the necessity for more transparent and effective sustainability reporting frameworks to enhance corporate practices and drive progress toward sustainability goals.
Open Access: Yes
An Analytically Derived Gauss–Legendre Quadrature for Axis-Aligned Ellipse–Ellipse Intersection
Publication Name: Mathematics
Publication Date: 2025-12-01
Volume: 13
Issue: 23
Page Range: Unknown
Description:
Accurate and efficient evaluation of the intersection area between two axis-aligned ellipses is essential in applications where the coordinate system or underlying geometry naturally imposes alignment. However, most existing numerical integration techniques are designed for arbitrarily oriented ellipses, and their generality typically requires adaptive refinement or solving higher-degree algebraic intersection formulations, leading to greater computational cost than necessary in the axis-aligned case. This study introduces two analytically derived, fixed-cost Gauss–Legendre quadrature formulations for computing the intersection area in the axis-aligned configuration. The first is a sine-mapped Gauss–Legendre quadrature, which applies a trigonometric transformation to improve conditioning near endpoint singularities while retaining constant-time evaluation. The second is an enhanced two-panel affine-normalized formulation, which splits the intersection domain into two sub-intervals to increase local accuracy while maintaining a fixed computational cost. Both methods are benchmarked against adaptive Simpson integration, polygonal discretization, and Monte Carlo sampling over 10,000 randomly generated ellipse pairs. The two-panel formulation achieves a mean relative error of 0.003% with runtimes more than twenty times faster than the adaptive reference and remains consistently more efficient than the polygonal and Monte Carlo approaches while exhibiting comparable or superior numerical behavior across all tested regimes.
Open Access: Yes
DOI: 10.3390/math13233814
The impact of machine learning applications in agricultural supply chain: a topic modeling-based review
Publication Name: Discover Food
Publication Date: 2025-12-01
Volume: 5
Issue: 1
Page Range: Unknown
Description:
Machine learning (ML) has become a pivotal element in agriculture, providing groundbreaking solutions to tackle intricate issues related to productivity, sustainability, and resource management. A comprehensive examination of the current literature is crucial as the discipline evolves, allowing for the identification of significant themes, trends, and focal discussions. The current study employs latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based topic modeling to examine 1114 publications regarding ML applications in agriculture, sourced from the Scopus database. The analysis indicates notable expansion in ML studies, featuring leading publications across various interdisciplinary fields. Six primary areas have been identified: precision agriculture and remote monitoring, molecular and food composition analysis, food systems and agricultural applications, quality assurance and adulteration detection, advanced financial and technological applications in ML, and predictive modeling for agricultural success and efficiency. Every topic is examined to highlight its contributions and possible avenues for further investigation. The analysis offers theoretical perspectives on the interdisciplinary aspects of ML in agriculture, along with practical applications for farmers, agribusiness experts, policymakers, and technologists. This study represents the first thorough review of ML applications in agriculture utilizing the LDA approach. It provides a current and comprehensive understanding of the field, while also uncovering emerging areas and opportunities for future exploration.
Open Access: Yes
A novel numerical investigation of fiber Bragg gratings with dispersive reflectivity having polynomial law of nonlinearity
Publication Name: Scientific Reports
Publication Date: 2025-12-01
Volume: 15
Issue: 1
Page Range: Unknown
Description:
Fiber Bragg gratings represent a pivotal advancement in the field of photonics and optical fiber technology. The numerical modeling of fiber Bragg gratings is essential for understanding their optical behavior and optimizing their performance for specific applications. In this paper, numerical solutions for the revered optical fiber Bragg gratings that are considered with a cubic-quintic-septic form of nonlinear medium are constructed first time by using an iterative technique named as residual power series technique (RPST) via conformable derivative. The competency of the technique is examined by several numerical examples. By considering the suitable values of parameters, the power series solutions are illustrated by sketching 2D, 3D, and contour profiles. The results obtained by employing the RPST are compared with exact solutions to reveal that the method is easy to implement, straightforward and convenient to handle a wide range of fractional order systems in fiber Bragg gratings. The obtained solutions can provide help to visualize how light propagates or deforms due to dispersion or nonlinearity.
Open Access: Yes
Navigating global financial turbulence: The evergrande collapse and its contagion effect
Publication Name: International Review of Economics and Finance
Publication Date: 2025-12-01
Volume: 104
Issue: Unknown
Page Range: Unknown
Description:
This study investigates the contagion effects of the Evergrande collapse across international financial markets, with emphasis on tail-risk dynamics. Unlike prior work focusing on average spillovers or event windows, we employ a Quantile Vector Autoregression (QVAR) framework to capture state-dependent connectedness under bearish, median, and bullish market conditions, as well as calm versus turbulent volatility regimes. Using daily data for nine major stock indices (2015–2024), we find that the Evergrande crisis significantly amplified global spillovers, but with heterogeneous magnitudes across quantiles. At the 95 % volatility quantile, returns spillovers in the median quantile from Shanghai to the EU increased, during the Evergrande crisis, by approximately 3.5 % in the Net Pairwise Connectedness (NPC) case. In contrast, with very few exceptions, Canadian spillovers remained negligible, confirming its resilience and diversification potential. These results show that extreme market states reveal contagion patterns invisible in average-state analyses, underscoring the systemic role of Hong Kong as a transmission hub and the conditional global influence of Shanghai. The findings provide actionable insights for policymakers on monitoring tail-risk channels and for investors seeking hedging strategies in insulated markets.
Open Access: Yes
Application of whey protein-based edible coatings containing lemon peel powder and extract to maintain the antioxidant properties of table grapes during ambient storage
Publication Name: Food and Humanity
Publication Date: 2025-12-01
Volume: 5
Issue: Unknown
Page Range: Unknown
Description:
Table grapes are among the most widely consumed fruits worldwide; however, their shelf life is limited by water loss, microbial spoilage, and degradation of antioxidants. This study examined the effects of whey protein-based edible coatings enriched with 1 % lemon peel powder (LP1), 2 % lemon peel powder (LP2), 1 % lemon peel extract (LE1), or 2 % lemon peel extract (LE2) on the quality of Red Globe table grapes during 14-day ambient storage. The highest weight loss (33.2 %) occurred in uncoated samples, while LP1 had the lowest (20.4 %), indicating improved moisture retention. The initial pH of uncoated table grapes (3.63) increased to 4.23 by the end of storage. All coatings slowed this increase, resulting in final pH values ranging from 4.03 to 4.10. Regarding antioxidant-related parameters, LP1 showed higher total polyphenol content (TPC), ascorbic acid content, antioxidant activity (DPPH assay), and total monomeric anthocyanin (TMA) by 43.7 %, 25.0 %, 24.1 %, and 10.1 %, respectively, compared to uncoated samples. Among extract-enriched coatings, only LE1 maintained significantly higher antioxidant activity (75.8 %), while TPC and ascorbic acid levels were comparable to those of the uncoated samples. TMA content in LE-treated table grapes (23.6–22.5 mg CGE/100 g) was lower than in uncoated samples (26.7 mg CGE/100 g). Multivariate analyses (PCA, HCA) revealed distinct clustering between coated and uncoated samples, with LP1 showing the most pronounced separation. These results indicate that LP1 treatment may help reduce weight loss and support antioxidant stability, offering a potentially sustainable postharvest strategy for table grapes.
Open Access: Yes
