Inês Ribeiro

Controversies in Posttraumatic Epilepsy

In civilian accidents the factors involved in the origin of posttraumatic epilepsy are controversial. In this study of 506 consecutive head trauma patients and 101 epileptic patients developing seizures after head trauma, we have examined the importance of the duration of coma, type of seizure and drug therapy, time to first seizure, age and focal lesions and compared our results with the literature. The importance is stressed of focal lesions and of neurological deficits for the origin of posttraumatic seizures.

Assessment of Energy Consumption in Injection Moulding Process

Injection moulding may appear to be a benign process regarding energy consumption. However, the large scale of this process makes its impacts especially critic and minor efficiency improvements may lead to high overall energy savings. Moreover, energy consumption affects not only the product manufacturing costs, but is also a critical component in any overall sustainability strategy. This paper presents a model that estimates in an early phase of the design of a plastic part the energy consumption during its manufacturing. This enables estimating the energy consumption for different part geometries and different machines and process conditions prior to the production phase. Moreover, this paper contributes in integrating thermodynamic fundamentals and empirical relations fostered by literature review and an experimental analysis developed in an injection moulding company. In the end the thermodynamic/empirical model is validated by comparing its results for several parts with the measured real energy consumption.

Application of Life Cycle Engineering for the Comparison of Biodegradable Polymers Injection Moulding Performance

The use of biodegradable and compostable polymers (BDP) has a rising concern derived from its particular characteristics. Currently, various BDPs are combined to improve technical performance, to open up new applications or to reduce costs. In this paper a Life-Cycle-Engineering model is developed to compare the economical, environmental and technical dimensions of performance for 4 different types of BDPs when processed through injection moulding technology. The proposed model allows for comprehensive alternative comparison, supporting informed material selection decisions in a product-design context. The use of a ternary decision space supports materials comparison and the identification of their ‘‘best alternative domains’’.

Comprehensive Model to Evaluate the Impact of Tooling Design Decisions on the Life Cycle Cost and Environmental Performance

The design and production of dedicated tools is usually a technically complex and demanding activity, as it highly influences the manufacturing process in which they are used, from material and energy consumption to reliability and cycle time parameters. However, despite being acknowledged by the industry, it is still lacking the quantification of these impacts due to the “one of a kind” nature of these tools. The model proposed in this paper overviews the research work under development, aiming to quantify the tool life cycle impacts. By using process-based models the costs and environmental impacts are assessed and modelled to be sensitive to part and tool design changes.

Remotely sensed indicators and open-access biodiversity data to assess bird diversity patterns in Mediterranean rural landscapes.

Changes in ecosystem area are often used to assess human impacts on habitats and estimate biodiversity change. However, because species respond to structural changes at fine spatial scales the use of area alone may not capture all relevant changes. Operational costs limit the assessment of biodiversity change at a simultaneously fine spatial resolution and large scales. The development of cost-effective and expedite methods to monitor biodiversity change is therefore required. We use open access satellite imagery and biodiversity data to investigate the importance of variables of habitat extent and structure in explaining species richness and community dissimilarity of forest and open-land birds at the regional scale. Moreover, because Mediterranean landscapes are subject to seasonal dynamics, we explore the indicator value of remotely sensed variables measured in spring and summer. A large-scale dataset of bird occurrence data, including 8042 observations and 78 species, distributed by 40 landscape-sized cells, was assembled from GBIF after controlling for data quality. We found that summer satellite imagery, when the green perennial vegetation is more apparent, is particularly suited to model the diversity patterns of forest species, because distribution of tree cover in the landscape is well captured. Summer data is also useful to monitor the perennial elements that shape landscape structure and the habitat of open-land species. Specifically, mean NDVI and a second-order NDVI texture variable, were found to be good indicators of forest and open-land habitats, respectively. The use of spring imagery appears to be useful to monitor habitat structure within open-land habitat patches. Overall, NDVI texture measures were found to be good predictors of bird diversity patterns at large scales. Also, we were able to successfully conduct a regional scale analysis using open-access data, which illustrates their potential to inform large scale biodiversity monitoring.

Integration of Life Cycle Engineering and Multi-attribute Analysis to Support Product Development: Process Design and Material Selection for a Clothes Peg

Materials selection is one of the most important phases in the design of a product. In recent years there have been several methods to help designers in materials selection. Several factors such as the environmental impact of the products have been increasingly valued by the society in general, which has been a drive to include environmental analyses in materials selections methods. The recently arisen methodology Life Cycle Engineering provides just an answer to these needs. In this chapter the Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) methodology is applied to a simple case study – a clothes peg, within the objective of illustrate the potentialities of introducing LCE in early design phases. LCE is based on three dimensions of analysis: Life Cycle Cost, Life Cycle Assessment and a technical evaluation. Life Cycle Cost is an economic analysis of the product throughout its life. Life Cycle Assessment is an evaluation of environmental impacts caused during the product lifetime, and technical evaluation consists in the evaluation of the candidate materials based on the functions or the requirements of the product. The purpose of this study was to select candidate materials and to design the manufacturing process for a clothes peg applying the LCE methodology. The design alternatives were therefore evaluated based on these three dimensions of analysis. A decision making methodology called Multi-attribute Utility Analysis was used for the final selection of the best material and process. This analysis is based on the consumers’ opinion, that in this particular application rely on three factors: the market price, the environmental impact and the quality of the product. The proposed methodology integrates a life cycle analysis (LCE) with the value given by the costumer to each dimension considering a specific product.