Hot Topic: Ensuring a Sustainable World

Article Abstracts

IEEE experts are currently researching critical issues within sustainable energy and sustainable world as part of the relentless pursuit for the betterment of our global society. Article abstracts found in IEEE Xplore, cross the following key issues:

providing sustainable and affordable electricity to underdeveloped nations;
energy harvesting, such as wind energy, hydroelectric power and wind turbines;
developing second generation biofuels and other alternatives to gasoline;
managing CO2 emissions;
water harvesting, water resources, etc.;
geothermal heating and its effects on the environment;
deforestation and detection technologies;
smart grid technologies and their importance for reducing the carbon footprint; and
understanding the aging energy workforce, and how it will create a void of qualified professionals to address sustainable issues.

Mapping Deforestation and Age of Evergreen Trees by Applying a Binary Coding Method to Time-Series Landsat November Images

This paper proposes a binary coding method, a novel post classification change detection method that indexes multi-temporal satellite images into a single information layer. As a case study, this method is applied to the production of a deforestation map and a tree age map of evergreen trees. The binary coding method produced a deforestation map, which contained the history of forest fires and massive replantation while the tree age map shows the age of evergreen trees with 30 years of range, both in approximately five-year temporal resolution. Comparison of the results with a digital forest inventory, forest fire records, and field investigations showed good agreement on the south-facing sunny slopes.

Author: Hoonyol Lee
This paper appears in: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Publication Date: Nov. 2008
Volume: 46, Issue: 11, Part 2, Page(s): 3926-3936

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Comparison of Modeling Approaches for Optimizing Alternative Energy Systems: An Example of Farm Storage for Wind Energy

Due to the depletion of traditional energy resources and our awareness of the negative impacts of them, alternative green energy resources have been receiving attention world-wide. The planning and modeling of an energy generation system is one of the important issues when developing a region. Given the competitive market for energy sources and complex energy production schedules, it is useful to determine the important factors affecting the optimal utilization of the energy source. Since several models for optimizing alternative energy sources generally exist, it is important to develop approaches for evaluating the different models for planning and operating effective energy systems. This paper looks at a methodology for analyzing alternative models and demonstrating this approach for the case of evaluating wind energy farm.

Authors: Ye Li; Lence, B.J.; Causal, S.M.
This paper appears in: IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics
Publication Date: 9-13 July 2006
Volume 3, Page(s):1943 - 1948

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