Water deficit, especially during summer, is currently one of the most important stress factors that influence olive oil production in olive orchards. A precision irrigation strategy, based on daily trunk growth, was assessed and compared with one continuous deficit, one full irrigation, and two different regulated deficit irrigation strategies. All of them were tested in a super high-density olive orchard located in northeast Spain, in which oil production, main oil production components, applied irrigation water, and water productivity were assessed. For this purpose, the crop was monitored from budding to harvesting, mainly during the summer months in which the Precision strategy only applied water after two days of negative daily trunk growth. Maximum monthly water savings for the Precision strategy reached 91.8%, compared with full irrigation, while major annual mean water savings reached 50% for the continuous deficit strategy and 31.2% for the Precision strategy, which also reduced irrigation events by up to 19.7%, compared with the full irrigation strategy. Oil production and oil production components varied depending on the irrigation strategies providing the Control, one of the regulated deficit irrigations, and Precision higher values than the other strategies; oil yield results differ, nonetheless. The Precision strategy showed an overall better performance. Despite this, it did not achieve the highest water saving, it achieved higher water productivity.
Most of the fatalities in the agricultural sector in developed countries are related to machinery use, particularly tractor overturning. Despite its importance, a lack of practical teaching about this topic has been detected in the Agricultural Engineering curricula. For this reason, an active learning activity was planned within a teaching innovation project. The objective of this project was to design a structure as new teaching material to implement and use it to determine the tractor’s center of gravity coordinates. This teaching innovation project was organized in two stages: 1) The design of proposals by students following previously established requirements, and 2) A practical exercise to analyze tractor stability. Each stage involved students from two different Agricultural Engineering degree subjects. Before the second stage, the professor performed the final design of the structure based on previous proposals and later the structure was built. Five different ramp design proposals were received and graded in the first stage. A positive correlation between peer review and the professor’s grades was found. During the second stage, the ramps were used in another subject, in which the grades obtained in the related practical exercise were significantly higher in comparison with those got in the previous year. However, no improvement was found in the final exam grades. This activity involved students in the entire learning process and showed a positive influence on some of the evaluation activities.
Dust explosions are a major concern in many industrial facilities and particularly in storage areas of biomass materials. Although venting standards (EN 14491 and NFPA 68) provide satisfactory safety levels for most industrial applications, they present some limitations and there exist situations that they do not contemplate. Vented dust explosions in a 4500 m3 silo for the storage of wood pellets were simulated by computational fluid dynamics. Maximum overpressures were registered and compared. The influence of several parameters including initial turbulence level, dust concentration, ignition location, and vent area was studied. A factorial analysis was carried out to determine the importance of each of the four parameters, along with possible interactions between them. The results showed great variations in the overpressures between the different scenarios simulated. Vent area, ignition location, and dust concentration showed similar effects on the overpressure (around 25%), while initial turbulence had half this effect (13%). One interaction effect out of the eleven possible interactions was identified as relevant for this specific industrial scenario: the combination of the ignition location and the initial turbulence, with an additional effect of 5% on the overpressure. The factorial analysis applied in this study could be of interest to the risk assessment of industrial facilities.
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