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Scientific and business environment literature shows that green, sustainable innovation or eco-innovation has proven to be a source of competitive advantage today. The industrial clusters, their dynamism, and the synergies created within them attract a lot of attention from the scientific community. However, to date, the joint study of these two concepts and, more specifically, the factors that drive eco-innovation specifically in a cluster, have not been studied in depth. This article models eco-innovation in industrial clusters, thus addressing this gap and proposing a model based on information gathered from the literature and a detailed analysis of behavior in relation to eco-innovation in different sectors. Results suggest that including eco-innovation variables and measures may have positive implications such as improvements at the strategic level and the reduction of costs and use of resources. An eco-innovation model for clusters is proposed. It considers eight key factors that seek to raise its competitive level by promoting eco-innovation within clusters. The model includes five internal factors that analyze business capabilities and three external factors that study the effect of launching eco-innovative activities. This model could help the companies’ managers and those responsible for clusters in creating more successful strategies to increase competitiveness by enhancing eco-innovation. It could also serve as a guide for government entities in the performance of eco-innovative activities in economic sectors.

Water purification is indispensable to guarantee safe human consumption and to prevent diseases caused by the ingestion of contaminated water. This requires a series of water treatment processes which require investment. However, the economic limitations of rural communities hinder their ability to implement such water-treatment systems, as is the case in Ci enaga Grande of Santa Marta ("Large Swamp", in English) in Colombia. Low-cost systems can be used instead as simple and safe alternatives. Therefore, the objective of this work was to evaluate non-conventional, low-cost water processes to purify the water from the collection point of two stilt house villages in Ci enaga Grande of Santa Marta. These include: 1) Using two natural coagulants, Moringa Oleifera and Cassia Fistula; 2) filtration through a biosand filter and a carbon activated filter; and 3) disinfection through UV-C Radiation and through solar disinfection. The results showed a turbidity values reduction between 52% and 96% using the two natural coagulants; both turbidity and total coliforms achieved reductions of 98.4% and 76.9%, respectively in the filtration process; and removal of total coliforms up to 98.8% in the disinfection process. Despite the high rates of reduction in the different parameters, the water does not comply with the recommended limits for safe drinking water.

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Evaporation is a process that is widely used in the chemical industry and aims to concentrate a solution consisting of a non-volatile solute and a volatile solvent. In this paper the design of robust control systems for a simple effect evaporation system is presented. Two controllers were designed, the first was based on the Algebraic Riccati Equations (ARE) solutions technique and the second was derived from the D-K iteration method. To show the potentiality of the control system proposed, we present the results of some tests carried out in simulation.

This study makes a systemic review to cluster and create a competitiveness relationship considering a systems dynamics approach. A dynamic hypothesis was constructed to validate what factors increase a cluster’s level of competitiveness, through causal analysis. Then, the causal diagram that validates the dynamic H0 hypothesis was constructed in Vensim PLE systems®. Literature review shows the evolution of the cluster system according to the current needs of the market, and emphasizes the need for new approaches and models that capture the complexity and dynamics of this system, allowing the understanding of its structure and the evaluation of the contribution of factors and capabilities to cluster competitiveness. It highlights the usefulness of systems dynamics as a simulation methodology for dynamic and complex systems, and establishes itself as a growing line of research applied to various systems of study. Dynamic hypothesis H0 was validated using the causal diagram, reaching the conclusion that innovation, productive management, financial management, organizational management, commercial management, and cluster management factors positively increase the cluster competitiveness level. From structure analysis, the behavior is associated to the archetype “Path Dependence”, usual in growing industrial markets.

Cloud-based computation is known as the source architecture of the upcoming generation of IT enterprise. In context to up-coming trade solutions, the Information Technology sections are established under logical, personnel, and physical control, it transfers application software and large database to appropriate data centers, where security and management of database with services are not trustworthy fully. So this process may face many challenges towards society and organizations and that not been well understood over a while duration. This becomes one of the major challenges days today. So in this research, it focuses on security-based data storage using cloud, which plays one of the important aspects bases on qualities of services. To assure user data correctness in the cloud system, a flexible and effective distributed technique with two different salient features was examined by utilizing the token called homomorphic with erasure-coded data for distributed verification, based on this technique it achieved error data localization and integration of storage correctness. Also, it identifies server misbehaving, efficient, and security-based dynamic operations on data blocking such as data append, delete, and update methods. Performance analysis and security show the proposed method is more effective resilient and efficient against Byzantine failure, even server colluding attacks and malicious data modification attacks.