The background for my thesis is the fact that with rising electricity and oil prices it becomes interesting to calculate on alternative heating systems. I have chosen to calculate upon my parents? farm, which today heats the dwelling house with wood. This is very time-consuming work, time which could be spent on other work. The main objective for this study is to compare three different heating systems to decide how they differ considering effort and cost. The result from the calculations was that grain-heating system demanded the least amount of work, but the total cost was a little higher compared to chips heating. Chips heating required half as much work as today?s wood heating and had a little lower total costs compared with the corn heating. Which system to choose largely depends on how the own work is valued.

Uppsalahem is the leading housing corporation in Uppsala with its over 160 real estate properties. Uppsalahem is owned by the municipality of Uppsala, which has a climate and energy goal that aims for 100 MW of solar energy to be installed in Uppsala by 2030. The 100 MW goal, combined with Uppsalahem?s environmental policy, is a strong incentive to investigate the possibility of installing PV modules on the many available roof areas that Uppsalahem possesses. The objective of this thesis is to create a foundation for future decisions regarding PV systems for Uppsalahem.

Asset management in insurance companies differs from conventional asset management to the extent that respect has to be taken to both assets and the commitments the insurance company has towards its customers. A model that has proven to fit well regarding the matching of assets and liabilities is the Asset Liability Management Model (ALM model). In addition to the matching in the balance sheet, the ALM model can be used in a company's work with strategic portfolio allocation by applying it as a basis for analyzing investment strategies with expected risk and return. From this, the ALM model also becomes relevant for calculating key figures according to the legal framework Solvens II which includes laws and regulations regarding the demands on economical strength (solvens) of insurance companies.Hence, the goal of this masters thesis has been to, on behalf of Bliwa Livförsäkring, create an ALM model to support the asset management department of Bliwa in their work with defining a credible way of analyzing the future risk and return of Bliwa's asset portfolio and insurance undertakings.The ALM model generally consist of four submodels, the scenario model, the liability model, the asset model and the company model, where the scenario model often is named as the core of the ALM model. The course of action has been to develop these submodels individually, with focus on the scenario model.

The company Sol & Energiteknik wanted to examine the possibility to make a standardhouse totally energy independent. Based upon this I have, during the spring of 2007,examined the possibilities available at the market today through litterature studies, contactwith several companies and reading reports at the internet.The first thing to examine has been to determine the energy consumption for a standardhouse, and find out if there are better technologies to be used for energy conservation.My conclusion in this matter is that there are possibilities today for building a house moreenergy efficient.When I had reached the point at which my design for the house was decided, I also hadto choose the different products to use to produce energy as well as to store that energy.To produce heat and electricity to the house I decided to use a wind turbine and a solarwater heater.The most difficult part of designing a house that is energy independent is that theproduced energy must be stored somehow. Storing the heat is relatively easy beacuse theheat can be stored in a large water tank. The electricity is a bigger problem beacuse itmust be stored in batteries, which today are too expensive to be used in a standard house.In the future producing and storing hydrogen might be used to produce electricity, buttoday that technology is both expensive and not tested enough.My final conclusion is that a standard house can not be built to be totally energyindependent today, unless it is very expensive to connect the house to the electricitynetwork. As an alternative solution I came up with a proposal for a house which isconnected to the electricity network and have some amount of own produced energy.This house prooved to be a good investment if you choose to build it today, and it couldbe a very good investment in the long run beacuse energy prices increase every year..

Investors have been shown to be driven by emotional and psychological factors. This contradicts classical financial theories, for example the Efficient Market hypothesis which states that all investors act rationally. Behavioural Finance is an area of study which describes various psychological factors which may result in irrational investor behaviour.The primary question of the study is: which factors do operating people in the financial sector consider themselves to be influenced by? The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors which affect the process of creating forecasts or making financial decisions. The study examines in addition if there is a correlation between length of investor experience and overconfidence in forecasting accuracy and investment decision making.The study includes both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Antalet flygresor har ökat markant i världen de senaste decennierna. Detta har medfört en ökning av flygets koldioxidutsläpp som därmed har gett en ökad påverkan på klimatet. Forskning angående människors syn på och uppfattning om flyget är relativt ny och forskning rörande ämnet är mer förekommande idag än för ett decennium sedan. Tidigare undersökningar är dock i stort sett eniga om att människor, både miljömedvetna och icke-miljömedvetna personer, inte tänker ändra på sina flygvanor och flyga mindre på grund av flygets klimatpåverkan. Denna studie undersöker klimatengagerade personers flygvanor och vad de har för syn på flyget och flygets påverkan på klimatet.

The company Olofsfors AB manufactures drive belts for forest machinery, known as ECO-Tracks, and abrasion-resistant steel and cutting edges for graders, excavators and tractors, known as Bruxite and SharqEdges. Manufacturing these products requires the steel to be heated and molded, then submerged in water and hardened. The water used in the hardening of steel is pumped to the process from pits below the floor and then pumped back to the pit after it?s been used. Since the temperature of this water rises after being used to harden the steel the temperature of the pumping pit needs to be adjusted to maintain its setpoint of 21°C.

The increase of complexity in embedded programming is forcing the development of higher level programminglanguages. These languages not only consist of traditional text based programming but also with graphical programminglanguages such as the programming language G from LabVIEW which is developed by National Instruments and havebeen around since the mid eighties. However since 2004 this language has also been able to program embeddedhardware, using the modules LabVIEW SDK and LabVIEW for ARM. This thesis shows how LabVIEW for ARM converts itsgraphical language G to C and then how C is flashed into the microprocessor. The thesis also takes up the pros and consof using G for embedded development.

Sustainability reports have during the last decade had a strong development. Both in terms of establishing a sustainability assurance, in its form, and get it assured together with standards, principles and regulations which organisations and accountants have utilized. The growth of sustainability reports and the choice of getting them assured have in particular favoured the accounting business. Due to this result, some critics have voiced that assuring a sustainability report gain accounting firms more than it gains the actual organisation. Other say that it is necessary in order to increase the credibility and the eligibility of the report, while it also has become a requirement from stakeholders.

The cost for forestry logistics in Sweden is about 25 percent of the total cost of getting the raw material to industry (Anon., 2010). There might be much to gain by taking a look at your supply chains on the logistic side in your company. In this report the logistic chains by Mellanskog for ENA Energi AB in Enköping has been looked in to. ENA Energis plant is a combined power and heating plant and about 99, 5 percent of their fuel consisted of bio energy in year 2009 (ENA Energi, 2011, länk A). The main purpose with this report is to look at three questions: 1. How does the supply chain look today? From forest to industry. 2.

Evaluation of machinery costs is necessary for selecting appropriate farm machinery. Timeliness cost due to untimely operations is an important component of machinery costs. Timeliness costs can be high for crop sprayers, since pesticide application must be carried out within a short time interval. This Master thesis investigated the timeliness cost and the probability of a suitable workday for spraying. Timeliness factors were estimated for four different crops (oats, spring wheat, winter wheat and barley) using historical weed trial data.

The aim of my study is to answer the question whether there is a potential for services by working horses in the Swedish municipalities. The Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and Swedish Farmers Union (LRF) has started a cooperation called Climate School (Klimatskolan), with the purpose to increase knowledge in environmental and climate related issues in context of agriculture. This Master thesis is in the framework of the Climate School.Global warming is a problem that gets much attention today. Global warming and climate change are two subjects that are very much in focus on the political agenda. The municipalities of Sweden have a big responsibility concerning environmental work and to develop their own environmental thinking.

Specialarbete, 15 hpSvenska som andraspråk, SIS 133VT 2012 Handledare: Håkan Jansson.

This report provides a comparison between the products cellular concrete, foam concrete and LECA concrete. The questions to be answered during the work is how the cellular concrete stands up in cost terms to the existing competitors on the market, how the concrete products differ in design work, and in which situations the concrete varieties are preferred to use.Cellular concrete is a variant of ordinary concrete, with the difference that the ballast is exchanged from stone materials to expanded polystyrene beads (EPS). This substitution gives a product with higher insulation values but lower weight than ordinary concrete.The work was carried out by designing a survey which was sent to two hundred randomly chosen companies across Sweden, to see the building industry?s opinion of the product cellular concrete. The survey showed that cellular concrete was equals its competitors in terms of price, while the product was said to be more flexible, quicker and easier to cast.Then some of the companies, who participated in the survey, were interviewed to see more carefully, how the price, the workmanship and the time for casting and dehydration differed between the products.

Bakgrund: Det har visat sig att det i många fall kan vara svårt att jämföra kalkylinformation mellan likartade enheter trots att dessa använder sig av samma kalkyleringsmetoder, särskilt om enheterna i fråga är geografiskt placerade i regioner med olika kalkyleringstraditioner. Det är därför av intresse att undersöka hur kalkylinformationen kan skilja sig åt i dessa fall. Syfte: Syftet är att analysera försäljningsomkostnader med hänseende på deras urval och värdering i kalkyler. Genomförande: Vi har genomfört en casestudie med intervjuer med tre enhetschefer i den svenska divisionen samt med tre engelska chefer för motsvarande enheter i den brittiska divisionen inom en och samma globala koncern. Resultat: Vi finner i vår studie att kalkyltraditioner spelar en stor roll för vad kalkylinformationen visar, men att det även förekommer stora skillnader mellan enheter som har samma kalkyltradition.