Background: The most energy efficient houses today are so called passive houses. These houses achieve high energy-efficiency partly by having well insulated walls. U-value describes the amount of heat transfered through a building element, the more insulation, the smaller U-value. A typical passive house wall have a U-value of 0.10 W/m2,°C. The passive houses are primarily made as small family houses and not as a block of apartments.

The goal of our research is to give the general picture of the attitudes of immigrants to their own integration process into the Swedish society, focusing on the feeling of belonging, satisfaction with the social network, as well as confidence in the future. Moreover, in our study, we investigate a possible relation between the attitudes of the immigrants to the above-mentioned variables and their age and education. The research is based on a quantitative questionnaire investigation, which comprises all Sfi students at level D in the northeastern part of Skåne county. The research shows that the majority are open to the Swedish culture and traditions, keeping, at the same time, their own native traditions. Four out of five think that the Swedish language is important for integration.

The waste fractions offered to households in Sweden differ depending on where you live. The responsibility for the waste are grounded by the Swedish law where the municipality are responsible for the collection of household waste and FTI are responsible for collecting all packages and papers that the households sorts out. A new waste regulation is under consideration where the responsibility for the household waste may change. The bulky waste from households is collected at recycling centers where the households leave it in different containers for different fractions. These recycling centers are formed different and the fractions offered in them also differ depending on in what municipality they are located.

A clean and affordable energy source for cooking is deficient in developing countries. People rely on fuels that contribute to environmental, social and health problems.Biogas is an alternative energy source and an increased investment in small-scale biogas production can in several developing countries be found. Several projects have started to use the technology in developing countries because of the benefits with biogas. Some cases in the establishment of biogas plants have succeeded and some have not. The study is a literature review supplemented by two field studies.

The purpose of this report is to create and develop a model that streamlines and helps the innovationprocess of an idea owner and also in the development of ideas.This model should be able to apply for workshops and in innovation advice or business devlopment. I used the qualitative method in my essay just to get a maximum clear data collection, where the seven respondents were included in the interviews. However, much of the information retrieved from the theory books and research/science articles, in order to answer the research/Sceince question in the best possible way.

The rising demand for electricity and heat raises a big challange for the society and engineers. Many products have been introduced to the market to supply more energy to the energy systems. Absolicon AB is a Swedish company that develops and markets a combined heat and power generating product. The product, Absolicon X10, uses a parabolic trough to concentrate the radiation of the sun onto a receiver. The receiveris equipped with mono crystalline solar cells and is cooled by a circulating liquid media.

To create multifunctional buffer strips along a watercourse in an economically sustainable way requires consideration of many different factors. In this plan we have selected pollutant reduction as the main purpose of the buffer strip. We have also strived to achieve minimal income loss due to reduced production, increased biological diversity, good game preservation that leads to higher income from hunting, aesthetical satisfaction and possibility to profit from available subsidies. This is done mainly to make landowners/farmers more interested in creating buffer strips along water courses. As sand is the dominant type of soil in the area, the water course is less affected by surface runoff compared to if the soil would be clay or some other finer texture. Game preservation and subsidies have therefore been the main factors when establishing the width of the strip, because these require wider buffer strips in some cases.

This study has examined if importation of waste for energy recovery can reduce the climate impacts of Waste Management Systems. Using Systems Analysis this study will try to examine the complex waste systems in a systematical and strictly logical way to see how these systems interact and affect each other. Specifically examining the climate impact of waste management systems in England. The traditional way of handling waste in England is through Landfills. Land filling leads to emissions of the greenhouse gas Methane. The EU has put in place a landfill directive that is supposed to lead the member states away from land filling as a method of waste management. Today in Sweden there is a competition for the waste available for incineration. The worsening economical situation together with less product packaging and an increase in source separation leads to a lack of waste available for incineration.

The aim of this study was to map the intellectual base at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) at the University Collage of Borås, and to compare this intellectual base to the intellectual base of the research area Library and Information Science. This was done by analysing the citations in publications published, between the year of 2001 to the first quarter of 2006, by researchers at the institution, using the technique of author cocitation analysis. Cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling, statistical techniques that are traditional i the author cocitation analysis, formed an objective map of the intellectual base at the SSLIS. This map was then compared with three prior studies, that used the same technique to map the intellectual base of the research area. The result shows that the map of the intellectual base at the SSLIS consists of the specialities: user studies, library studies, culture/cultural policy, information retrieval, bibliometrics and information in organisations.

A clean and affordable energy source for cooking is deficient in developing countries. People rely on fuels that contribute to environmental, social and health problems.Biogas is an alternative energy source and an increased investment in small-scale biogas production can in several developing countries be found. Several projects have started to use the technology in developing countries because of the benefits with biogas. Some cases in the establishment of biogas plants have succeeded and some have not. The study is a literature review supplemented by two field studies.

Starting out as a minor form of amusement, the game industry has become one of the most lucrative andsuccessful in the entertainment business competing against giants such as television, movies and music.As the internal competition within the developer community grows companies work hard at discoveringnew ways to attract and keep customers. By having a playcentric approach focusing on user experiencethey hope to achieve that goal. This thesis describes the process of designing a game with focus on theplayer. We apply the concept of flow on game development and investigate through research throughdesign if we are able to create a game that keeps the player in flow.Play tests showed several elements such as control issues and too difficult challenges early in the game,affecting the possibility for players to experience flow while playing. These negative factors came to becalled flowleakers.

The energy in laundry rooms, in form heated air, can be utilized with a heat exchanger. A concept and an early prototype of the heat exchanger have already been developed to show that the theory works. This report describes the continued development and construction of the product.A field study was made in order to investigate the environmental usage and establish the product design. The most common washing machine was used as a calculation model, and calculations were also made to estimate the amount of energy in the air. A previous analysis of the existing prototype is also presented in this report, to show the products potential capacity.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, OTEC, is a sustainable energy conversion technology that is not yet commercialized. OTEC is a technology that utilizes the temperature difference in oceans between the warm surface water and the cold water at 1 000 m depth to run a Rankine Cycle. This technology can produce electricity and provide synergies like fresh water, air conditioning and aquaculture. A simulation program for three alternative OTEC systems has been created in order to decide which OTEC system is most profitable; closed, open or hybrid system. In this simulation a production cost analysis is performed in order to investigate and decide which one of the three systems that has the lowest production cost. The production cost analysis also analyzes if the profitability is affected by the size of the facility. After these analyzes, the most profitable of the three different OTEC-systems is expanded by an installation of solar collectors in order to see if the thermal efficiency is improved. The result shows that the most profitable system varies with the size of the facility.

In this thesis is studied the electrical load of Paradisskolan with respect to power quality and energy consumption. The school's owner Trollhättans Tomt AB is also interested to know if they can reduce their costs by changing to smaller meter fuses. A recurring ground fault that?s been recorded from powerpanel A1A has been investigated. The school's equipped with an electrical bonding system, harmonic filters for the third harmonic currents, TN-S system from feeding transformer and groundfault monitoring.

The purpose of this essay was to research the level of condition and requirements of democracy which faces states applying for a membership in the European Union. The focal point was to research the levels of democracy requirements on two set enlargements which are the cases of the 1981 and 1986 enlargements together with the 2004 and 2007. The states that did reach the goal of becoming member states had similar political backgrounds that made them suitable for a most- similar system study. By using my theoretical framework which consists of democracy theories, together with the chosen method was I able to find answers to my research questions when examining the material. The result of the study is that even though the condition might have been quite similar but the reality of them was different.