Environmental Impact Assessment of Onshore Wind Farms in the Region of Central Greece Using a Modified RIAM Method

Wind energy is one of the most basic forms of renewable energy,which shows an increasing rate of development worldwide and also at the European level.However,this rapid deployment of wind farms makes the need for an impact assessment of this type of projects on the natural and man-made environment imperative.The present paper aims to identify and assess the environmental impacts of wind farm projects in the Region of Central Greece.A modified Rapid Impact Assessment Matrix(RIAM)method is used for this purpose.The methodology includes the identification of the existing onshore wind farm projects in the study area,the appropriate modifications of the RIAM method to respond to the characteristics of the projects and the study area,the qualitative assessment of their potential impacts during construction and operational phases and the computation of the Environmental Performance Grade(EPG)of projects based on the pro-posed modified RIAM method.The results reveal that although there are some slight negative impacts on the natural environment of the study area,the examined wind farms contribute positively both to the atmosphere and to the socio-economic environment of the study.This study extends the potential for using RIAM as a tool in environmental impact assessment studies of renewable energy projects.

LDPC Coding Scheme for Improving the Reliability of Multi-Level-Cell NAND Flash Memory in Radiation Environments

Utilizing commercial off-the-shelf(COTS) components in satellites has received much attention due to the low cost. However, commercial memories suffer severe reliability problems in radiation environments. This paper studies the low-density parity-check(LDPC) coding scheme for improving the reliability of multi-level-cell(MLC) NAND Flash memory in radiation environments. Firstly, based on existing physical experiment works, we introduce a new error model for heavyion irradiations; secondly, we explore the optimization of writing voltage allocation to maximize the capacity of the storage channel; thirdly, we design the degree distribution of LDPC codes that is specially suitable for the proposed model; finally, we propose a joint detection-decoding scheme based on LDPC codes, which estimates the storage channel state and executes an adaptive log-likelihood ratio(LLR) calculation to achieve better performance. Simulation results show that, compared with the conventional LDPC coding scheme, the proposed scheme may almost double the lifetime of the MLC NAND Flash memory in radiation environments.

Morphometric Comparison of White Tambaqui （Piaractus brachypomus） in Lentic and Lotic Environments

The purpose of this paper is looking for associations between environmental factors and morphological parameters in tambaqui （Piaractus brachypomus） individuals to differentiate this species in lentic environments （lake） and lotic （river）. In this, regard studied 30 specimens, 15 from lentic environment （lake） and 15 from lotic （river）. Also, on right profile of these 25 morphometric variables were measured. On data matrix a PCA （principal components analysis） based on morphometric correlations matrix, which was defined in the new morphologic space of these specimens （3 principal components） which explain 73.23% of variability. Fish projection in first two principal components showed a morphological differentiation between two environments （lentic and lotic）, with variables as, horizontal eye diameter, length maxilla, suggesting greater response of these fish in lotic environment by their adaptation to light conditions, predators threat and food distribution. Finally, in lotic environment these fish have thinner caudal peduncle, indicating greater plasticity, namely stylized fish.